People keep asking me what it's like for a paraglider pilot to learn to fly sailplanes, so here goes. I was hooked after the trial lesson. The 'wow' of my first winch launch (actually not so much 'wow' as 'expletive'), the pleasant running up and down the ridge in light wave and the exciting 'Camphill Plunge' type landing was enough. Then the real work of learning began.

Sailplanes were quite scary at first. I am a natural born wimp but after eight years of paragliding I was fairly happy that I knew what I was doing in most situations and probably didn't realise how much of my own experience I took for granted. Paragliding is a very self reliant business where you make your own decisions, assess your own risks and extend your limits at your own pace. There was no way this approach could work for me with sailplanes and having to put myself in the hands of the instructors was really hard.

The instructors at Camphill were worried about the sense of the controls being reversed between a hang-glider bar and sailplane control stick, the chief instructor having had an exciting moment with a hang glider pilot some years previously. I don't think this was a problem having come from paragliding with a little stick and rudder experience from the more distant past. In reality, basic co-ordination apart, the problems were more subtle. For a start you can't see so much. On a paraglider the only area of sky not visible is the patch directly above you obscured by the wing. In a sailplane you cannot see behind or beneath you and in some you lie really supine with the forward view restricted by the instrument nacelle. The full reasoning behind the BGA ridge rules (also adopted by the BHPA) becomes clearer when you fly an aircraft with such limitations. Then there were times when I would go into 'paraglider mode'. I would suddenly realise I was getting lower and lower having forgotten that I had to do rather more than just put my feet down to land. This was made up for to some extent by the glide available, although, as a paraglider pilot, I took a lot of convincing to believe that from 1000 feet I could glide over 5 miles. Having this glide is great but means that I have to calculate glides from the altimeter and map and accept that if I get my sums wrong I might not get there. Does wonders for mental arithmetic.

As things progressed I found that in thermal conditions my paragliding experience was starting to pay off. Basically having a good idea where to look for lift and how to play things when conditions changed gave me a fair advantage. Wave flying, however, was a new experience. Although I had tinkered with wave on paragliders the wind strength for good wave was usually too high for my nerves. Flying a sailplane in glass smooth air and sunshine above lenticulars has to be experienced and not read about.

In 1996 I got my Bronze 'C' certificate, similar to 'Pilot' rating in paragliding. Although this includes two landings in pre-selected fields a further 'cross country endorsement' is required before being allowed to go beyond safe gliding distance of the airfield. The main content of this is two motorglider lessons. In the first the instructor gets you to about 1500 feet, cuts the throttle and lets you get on with it until it becomes obvious whether or not you are going to get into your chosen field. Sweaty stuff, especially when an RAF Tornado decides to join in on the base leg. The other lesson is a 100 km triangle. The official requirement is simply to navigate the triangle but my instructor decided to make it more interesting and realistic. One trick was to make me deviate from the track to thermal under clouds and another was to creep the throttle back without my noticing until I was forced into a field landing situation. Finally, with a combination of various cunning manoeuvres my instructor achieved his ultimate objective of getting me lost so I had to find myself again. It was all great fun and we finished off tearing back under a cloud street with the engine off.

Towards the end of the year the theory that, with my U.V. allergy problem, sailplanes could help me to get more out of British conditions than paragliding seemed to be proving true. I also began to realise that unless I got into a private glider syndicate I was going to be very frustrated the next year only flying club gliders. Getting into a suitible syndicate proved more of a problem than I thought and I resolved to start a new syndicate thinking that if I brought a 'new' glider on site I would easily find syndicate partners. With the training I'd had at that time and my paragliding experience I decided the two main questions about a glider were 'Is it heavy to rig?' and 'Are the airbrakes really effective to get me into a small field?' Just after Christmas I bought a 25 year old ASW15B, one of the early glass fibre gliders known to be robust and have straightforward handling. Almost all my spare time between then and the end of March was spent setting it up at Camphill. Amongst other things this involved casting chains into bucketful's of concrete to make ground anchors for the trailer, making a 'wing dolly' to enable the glider to be towed to the launch point behind the car, mending trailer wheel bearings and fixing minor faults on the glider. I was also changing jobs at that time so things did get a bit hectic. Finding a compatible syndicate partner also proved difficult. I had witnessed arguments between syndicate members and eventually decided that I might be better off with a bank loan instead.

So, at the start of 1997, I was set up to go cross country in my own glider. In theory my paragliding experience and sailplane training should have made it quite straightforward. In practice it was not so easy. The high cloudbases of the previous year just didn't happen and making my first cross country flight on a blue thermal day didn't seem a good plan. Nevertheless I tried to patiently stretch my flights and practice selecting landing fields and long glides. It's quite an act of faith to calculate a glide from about 10 miles away and then try to make decisions on route about whether or not to deviate to go under clouds. You don't often get such choices on a paraglider.

Finally one day in August I set off for Saltby, about 80 km from Camphill and had a really nice, if taxing, flight. My electric vario had broken down so I had to spend a while flying locally to make sure I could manage with the mechanical one before leaving Camphill. The visibility was quite poor so I was able to squeeze more value from my earlier motorglider practice by getting lost on the way and having to find myself again. As well as navigation problems the haze also made it difficult to see clouds or shadows and at one point I found myself getting low in the middle of a big blue hole. Fortunately Syerston airfield was at hand and I spent a while scratching about in weak lift nearby until I got away again. Coming back I seemed to be a bit more organised and, by careful selecton of route, even managed to cover some quite large distances without stopping to thermal.

So that's it. I'm having a good time on the hard stuff. It's a whole new world with lots to learn and I've still got a long way to go. The thing that still really gets me is strong wind conditions and wave. My paragliding brain still can't accept that its quite safe to fly in tree bending winds of 25 or more knots.