After eight years of paragliding I took up sailplanes in an attempt to make up for the impracticality of flying in hot climates because of a U.V. allergy. People have asked me what it's like for a paraglider pilot to learn to fly sailplanes, so here goes.

The irrepressible Walter Neumark, a former gliding instructor and promoter of paragliding was to blame. He knew I had been looking at microlights and told me to stop messing around and go to Camphill for a flight. I was hooked immediately. 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. Although a thoroughbred wimp, eight years of paragliding had left me fairly happy that I knew what I was doing in most situations. I 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. With my ingrained paragliding background there was no way this approach could work for me with sailplanes. I just had to put myself in the hands of the instructors. They rightly pushed me through the training but when you're used to sorting everything out for yourself it comes hard. I can't help feeling that people who say that you should assume the guy in the front is trying to kill you have got it the wrong way round!

Some instructors at Camphill were worried about the sense of the controls being reversed between a hang-glider bar and sailplane control stick, the CFI having had an interesting moment with a hang glider pilot in the front. 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. Gliders with really supine pilot posture and forward view restricted by the instrument nacelle seemed very difficult. The full reasoning behind the BGA ridge rules (also adopted by the British Hang-gliding and Paragliding Association) became clearer when explained to me in the context of 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 so I had more potential in a sailplane to fly out of trouble. It took a lot to convince this paraglider pilot that from 1000 feet he can glide over 5 miles instead of about 1½. Having this glide is great but calculating glides from the altimeter and map is a bit of a strain on my mental arithmetic.

As things progressed I found that in thermal conditions my paragliding experience was starting to pay off. Basically having a reasonable 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.

The Bronze 'C' certificate is similar in scope to the paragliding and hang-gliding 'Pilot' ratings. Field landings on a paraglider are almost trivial compared with a sailplane so I was more than willing to do the motorglider training for the cross country endorsement. Field selection was a sweat but so valuable that I resolved to have a session each spring. For the navigation exercise my instructor decided to make it more interesting and realistic. I won't give away all his tricks here. 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 flying only club gliders. Getting into a suitable syndicate proved more of a problem than I thought and I ended up in an ASW15B syndicate of two. Me and the bank.

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 either. Nevertheless I tried to be patient, stretch my flights, practice selecting landing fields and make long glides. It is an act of faith to calculate a glide to somewhere I can't actually see 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 and had a really nice, if taxing, flight. My electric vario broke down almost immediately so before I left the Camphill area I had to spend a while making sure I could manage with the mechanical one. The visibility was quite poor so I was able to squeeze more value from my motorglider practice by getting lost on the way and having to find myself again. Having more speed than a paraglider is great but it means that you can get lost a lot quicker! 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 was a bit more organised and, by careful selection of route, even managed to cover some quite large distances without stopping to thermal.

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. I suspect that I never really had to learn that part of the weather before. My paragliding brain can't yet accept that it's quite safe to fly in tree bending winds of 25 or more knots.