Paragliding in Nova Scotia

This last summer, Craig, Melissa, and I went on a little paragliding trip to Nova Scotia (by way of Wisconsin, but that is a completely different story). For Melissa and I, this was our first time travelling with our wings and it ended up with me completely hooked on the idea of para-vacationing!

It is an odd experience trusting your paragliding gear to baggage handlers. I mean, you hear what they do to baggage in general, and then you are going to let them dropkick thousands of dollars worth of equipment from one end of the airport to the other and then trust your life to it? More than that, we thought for sure that the inspectors would be "curious" about the gear and that we would be handed our harnesses with a wad of paragliding reserve crammed into the reserve container by a (hopefully) guilty and apologetic-looking TSA inspector. Luckily, this never happened, and with the exception of money-grubbing airlines charging extra for checked luggage - all of them with the exception of West Jet - there were no issues at all. Needless to say, we did a thourough inspection of all the gear prior to flying just in case a TSA rep got creative trying to hide an error.

Ahh Nova Scotia! Not sure about the rest of the province, but where we were staying in Parrsboro, on the Bay of Fundy, was the perfect example of a maritime fishing village. It's quite a ways off the usual tourist haunts and about two hours north-west of Halifax. Small doesn't come close to describing it; I think it took about 5 minutes to drive the length of the town centre (all one road of it) and there was just one hotel and a handful of restaurants, all of which closed before 10 PM, except the Tim Horton's.

We had figured that seeing as how we are all relatively new paragliding pilots, we decided to find a local guide to show us around the local flying sites and give us an idea of the conditions and things to look out for prior to flinging ourselves out into the Bay of Fundy. We met up with Michael Fuller of Pegasus Paragliding the first day and hit it off right away! On that first day, the winds were gusting to over 40 km/hour, so we spent the entire day driving around to the various sites. At some point I mentioned that, seeing that we were in Nova Scotia, I was looking forward to feasting on some lobster. Michael nodded and suggested in a deadpan that it was quite likely that something could be worked out. Later on in the day, we stopped at the commercial dock where he suggested we wait for a moment or two so he could meet up with a friend of his. Turns out that friend is a commercial fisherman who was just coming in after bringing in his lobster pots. Michael introduced us as some paraglider pilots from the West Coast and soon there were four gigantic lobsters being passed up from the boat in an plastic shopping bag. I asked the two of them how much I owed and the fisherman just sort of shrugged and told Mike that it would be about $12 or so... but really, Michael had helped him out with the generator last month and... well, really, it's just not really a big deal. I looked at Michael a little confused, but he just smiled, shook the fisherman's hand and started back to his truck. While we walked he just matter-of-factly told the three of us that we were coming over to his place for a lobster boil that night. I was blown away! Here is this guy whom we've just met who has just invited us into his home for dinner! I love this place! Needless to say, all aspects of dinner was amazing: the food, the company, and the conversation.

But you folks aren't reading this for a point-by-point rehashing of my vacation; you probably want to hear about the flying!

Well, the weather was incredibly uncooperative and it turned out that we only had three real paragliding days. One day was spent just getting the idea of ridge soaring with some "amazing" 15 second flights. In our defence, the winds weren't great – a bit low for ridge soaring – but it is also true that we just had no concept of how fast the whole thing has to happen! When your launch is only 20 feet above the landing zone, there is no time to think about what's going on: you've either launched and turned into the wind immediately, or you are on the beach looking at a mad scramble back up the bank. It was a steep learning curve. Sadly, just as we were getting the idea, the wind started punching up to 40 km/hour again, and the rest of the day was a wash.

Fast-forward through two days of rain and then we are with Brian, also from Pegasus Paragliding, at the Fox River launch over the Bay of Fundy with sapphire skies and perfect 25 to 30 km/hour winds. It. Was. Amazing. Since coming back to the West Coast and mountain flying, I've referred to soaring the Bay as "cheater flying". As long as you stayed within the lift band, you couldn't help but get lift! There was no turbulence and there were no punchy thermals; it was nothing but clean, laminar wind holding you in the air. There were times when I would just lean back in the harness, put my hands behind my head and relax while remaining perfectly still within the sky. Getting used to the idea of not having a constant horizontal component to flying was really odd at first, but once it sinks in that you aren't just going to drop out of the sky, it was just so relaxing! After the first 40 minutes, the wind started picking up a little bit and we had to start playing a balancing act between brake positions and the use of the speedbar to maneuver where you wanted to. Until this point, I had always thought of the speed bar as an all-or-nothing "get the hell out of Dodge" device; here it was just another tool to use while soaring back and forth along the ridge. Once I noticed I was regularly having to use 40 to 50% bar, it was time to land after floating back and forth above the Bay of Fundy for a solid hour and 45 minutes.

The next day... more rain. Then thunder storms with rain followed by driving wind and rain. See the pattern? While there was nothing we could do, it was disappointing to only get the one real flight in!

On our last day before heading back to Halifax for our flight home, we got a call from Brian saying that while it looked like there might be rain later, the West Bay launch was golden and we had to get out there ASAP! And get out there we did. Paragliding in cloudy skies was a very odd experience and something that I would never have thought to do were it not for the experienced local assuring us that since the landing zone was always just below you, should the rain start, you just went and landed. Now, because of the possibility of rain, it was suggested that we don't stay too high, but we should get out there and get going! Again, it was amazing! Directly to the right of launch was a bowl that connected a point with the shore, and given that the winds were coming in directly from the bay, that bowl acted as a paragliding elevator: +1.6 metres/second and smooth as silk. You just had to find the point in your controls where you were stationary, then just enjoy the ride to the top of the ridge and above.

I've rambled on long enough; I'll let the video speak for itself:

To sum it up, we'll be going back to Nova Scotia again – as many times as I can – as we only just barely scratched the surface of the paragliding possibilities on the amazing Bay of Fundy.