Balloon Day

With a very scruffy night before, we weren't expecting great things out of Saturday May 9th to set up Puff to help celebrate the Asthma Foundation's Balloon Day celebrations, but it dawned clear enough to warrant going to have a look at the tether site at the Petone Mitre 10 Mega. It was windy when we arrived, but we waited it out, and while the wind did drop slightly, it was still just too wafty and shifty to do anything with the balloon. It eventually got to lunchtime and the carpark was starting to fill up and we were taking valuable acreage, so we had to can it basically. While other parts of Wellington were calm, in the prevailing (very cold) southerly conditions, the location was just a bit too close to the Petone foreshore and the wind that gets generated up the harbour. So once again Puff doesn't get to see another Balloon Day, but admittedly he still does a helluva job in the lead up to it by raising awareness. About the only person to get some ballooning action was Ziggy, who enjoyed clambering around the basket and helped to pack the balloon away. And he was definitely dressed in the right colours.

Well, It's Been a While

But if you really want to catch up on what's going on, check out the Lift Off Levin website, which keeps you updated on what's been happening in my part of the world with balloons. Or rather more to do with the balloon event that I was involved with over Easter. I was there for the briefings, inflating helium balloons to create a target at one of the events and generally running around watching balloons launch and fly off into the distance. Apart from the odd pull on a rope and the odd retrieve, I wasn't even really involved in crewing at all. I didn't even have a flight. I'm not complaining, it just felt a little, well, weird to not be entirely in the thick of it. It did mean that my partner and I and her two boys could just take in the Nightglow on the Saturday as just an event, wandering around the food stalls, jumping on the bouncy castle (the kids, not me) and taking in the glow from inside and outside the field. It didn't ever become the hot, sweaty and energy-sapping experience that working a balloon in the dark normally is. Part of me missed that, another part (the one enjoying the company I was keeping) certainly didn't.

As it was we were put to work the next night at the Basin Reserve Nightglow (sans kids this time) as my partner Sonja ran the crew on the gates and I finally got the gloves on. But even then I was just lending a hand to proceedings and still felt I could have been doing more. But it was still great to be in there taking it all in (and I did pull out and then replace all the waratah standards around the cricket pitch, so that counts as a bit of an effort). It was a magic sight on a magic Wellington evening.



So it has been about a month since then, so I have been filling in the time updating and honing the Levin Blog (and wishing I had the time and skill to update the god-awful Lift Off Levin website). During that time I also had a bit of a scoot round YouTube checking out other crazy ballooning stuff like this:



Although it did feel a little like I was killing time. So it was quite good when the Friday before last Denis gave me a call on another one of those eerily calm Wellington evenings to see if I could lend a hand down at the waterfront to put up Puff. Didn't really have to be asked twice. It was a good opportunity to raise awareness of the upcoming Balloon Day and a chance to grapple with the challenge of putting up the balloon in an unusual and limited space. It was also a frustrating exercise in how to figure out how to untangle a smartvent after the last people to pack the balloon away had somehow turned it inside out - it made me glad that I don't fly as part of a syndicate where I imagine this sort of thing (different er um ways of packing away) may well happen a bit. Anyway, it went up in the end and all looked good really, and was a good chance to get in some actual ballooning - even if we didn't get to fly.