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With the year coming to an end I decided to make a clean break from some footage, so before archiving it into oblivion, I wanted to make a video out of the footage I have yet to use.

The first video is from this year’s Flytec race in Florida, and the second one is from 2009’s race (on a day off from racing). There are more photos from this year’s trip at my tumblr blog. Oh, and the music I made in Garage Band.

Around 1:15 in the above video, I was freaking out. Or, I guess I should say, I had just been freaking out and was now relieved. Before gaining this much altitude, there was no good place to land, it was all swamp, and the high winds were pushing me into them and I was only at about 1,400′.

Then I saw a bird turning and raced to it and caught the thermal he was in and saved it!

That thermal drifted with the wind, and me, over this unlandable terrain, but luckily I was safely in a thermal. I was not about to loose track of it and fall out of the thermal over this area.

I looked below me and was happy I wasn’t in these person’s shoes (see the photo). They had drifted over this area fairly low. The day before a pilot had landed in a swamp and gotten chased by an alligator, at least that’s what the story was. So I was happy to be up in a thermal climbing, and not down low sweating.

Luckily, the pilot in the photo made it out of that area, but that’s the risk they chose to take, that’s competition flying.

Below is a video from the previous year’s competition in Florida. The winds were to strong to compete so we went off to find some fun. The day before I shot this short video, we had been on another windy day off and were soaring an abandoned hotel on the beach, see that video here.

I also just made a playlist on YouTube so all my hang gliding videos can be grouped, viewed, and shared all together. Here’s the link to the playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=1B350C54D54B3C57