The Depths of Winter...

Sometimes you get lucky and you get some flying in during winter. Often down this part of the world after a good Southerly blast the following days can be very calm and clear - which of course happened a few weeks ago when Denis headed up to the Hawkes Bay to do some flying and a schools tour with Puff. Five schools in two days is good going in anyone's book and I'm not sure I could have hacked the pace if I'd been there, but I had other things on, such as my lovely partner's birthday to celebrate. Puff went down a treat with the kids and apparently it was supposed to be four schools that they were to do, but a principal jumped out onto the road in front of them and demanded that they come to his school as well. The boys and the Asthma educator who was along for the trip were only too happy to oblige. Anyways, I missed out, but there will probably be some more flying on the near horizon.

In the meanwhile, it is an opportunity to scan the goings-on in ballooning on the wide wide world of web, particularly as things are in full swing in the other (Northern) hemisphere at the moment. The Aunty Monkey website is one that I have known about for a while, but I have finally added to my bookmarks as a place to go for interesting stuff from the ballooning community - although old hands are not always kind to the newbies, and the discussions can get a little out of hand, it is a great place to wander through and pic up ideas, like this guy with what seems like one helluva cloudhopper. Great way to start on a budget (and if you're single I guess).

Further wanderings lead me to other places (as they do) and just took me up another path completely. How about a new option for ballooning in New Zealand? Something with the impact of a special shape, but with wider capabilities than these or even classic hot air balloons? How about:


A hot-air airship? Okay, not as beautiful and slender as the helium or hydrogen airship, but a helluva lot easier to set up and move around. Cameron Balloons are the main movers in the manufacture of these puppies and they would make a sensational addition to any fiesta. Now I wonder how much it would cost to bring the first one into New Zealand? If you'll excuse me, I'm just off to buy a Lotto ticket...

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.

One Week Out

Well, I'm getting my toys together ready for the big Lift Off Levin event. One cool feature that I can now add is a flight tracking from the cellphone via Nokia Sportstracker, which should give some interesting results from the balloon. Here is an example I got with some testing I did driving from work to pick up the boys at school.

http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/workoutdetail/index.do?id=811768

Can't wait to try it out on a flight now....

What The!!?? A Ballooning Rap?

I do recall seeing a cute little clip once with an old bluesman with his guitar and another guy singing along while in the basket. It kinda worked. But a ballooning rap? With the "crew" badly CGI'ed into the basket? Dope.

A Blip in a Balloon Fanned My Fiscal Fears

This Times Online article makes an interesting analogy between hot air ballooning and the financial situation. It fits more than he knows it. The best way to keep a balloon in good condition is by keeping it in level flight - not with rapid climbs and plummeting descents. It seems to me that people who own their own balloons understand this - those that fly them don't always (i.e., the pilot is not always the owner and this sometimes reflects the attitude to the craft in my experience). The steadiest flier succeeds in the long term by not racing skyward, as it costs just as much energy to come down. Something that those running businesses that are not necessarily their own have seemed not to understand.

Wairarapa Day 2 Evening

After a pleasant morning flight, it became clear as the day wore on that conditions were not becoming conducive to a possible nightglow. Being not quite able to have a snooze as is often the balloonist's habit after the early morning start, I felt the gradual change in temperature as the barometer must have dropped a few notches. A heavy shower at the briefing did not bode well, but crews duly jumped in vehicles and headed for the site - an amphitheatre arrangement just to the side of Queen Elizabeth Park in Masterton. It may have made a very nice venue for a glow, but we never got to find out because of an absolute deluge just before we were due to set up. The place just turned into a lake basically and that was the end of the event. While managing to avoid getting too wet, we headed back to our digs to review the situation. I did some weather forecasting and made a decision to head home early, as the continued southerly flow meant that the possibility of flying the following day was absolutely minimal.

Trolling around looking for stories about the event, I must admit to having a bit of a giggle at this little effort from the Wairarapa Times-Age. You don't expect such grandiose writing from a provincial newspaper - perhaps the scribe is suffering the slings and arrows of having to take his double major Journalism/Literature Degree out to some backwater and struggle with the burden of local news. Escher-esque "box wind" effect? Seriously? Not sure I saw any pilots flying upside down tho'. The marvellous part of this article is the balloonist interviewed lowering the satorial tone no end. Cheers Murray.