Hamilton, oh Hamilton, Biggest little city ina Noo Zealand

MassAssHam1, originally uploaded by madballoonz.

When the Mass Ascension rolls around, you kinda forget the wobbly wheels of the event organisation - the blood starts pumping as you work on inflating around thirty other balloons. Except there maybe weren't thirty balloons. And the conditions were a little breezy, so people didn't muck around on the ground, so therefore the "mass" part was lost from the ascension. Our biggest surprise was when a woman wandered up to us and announced she was riding with us this morning, as a treat from the sponsors. Great, thanks for telling us at the morning briefing organiser dudes. Anyway, it's kinda hard to argue the point when you're ready to roll, so we bundled her in.

And we trundled along, at a fairly good clip - a nearby pilot with all the gears clocked between 40 and 45 km/h, which in a balloon is moving along. Tricky little wind at Flagstaff started pushing us backwards, so rather than risk an awkward landing we headed for the country, where a highlight was being pursued by a hawk, watching the determined look on his face as he steadily beat after us thinking "man, if I bring this down I'll be eating for a month."

We lost him as we had to gain considerable height over power pylons (probably more than Denis was comfortable with). That combined with the windspeed meant this had the potential to be an interesting landing, but Denis dropped it with a double-hop and a twist on one corner and down - no drag. In fact I can't recall ever having a drag-landing with Denis and only one tipover in the five years I've been flying with him. I think this is mainly down to him making his decision on the landing before he even takes off, which is why those two pull-downs all that time ago in Masterton make sense. But more on that later.