Episode 11 of our European Overland trip 2020
For those who prefer the vlog, it’s at the bottom…;-)
After our departure from Gdansk and the goodbyes to our dear friends Hans and Christine, we explore the north coast of Poland. Unfortunately the wind is too strong so there are no options of flying the coast. Better luck next time, but the cold weather is chasing us south.
So we decide to go back to the Czech Republic and explore the flying site Raná, which was recommended to us by Vlasti. It is a small hill in the north west, in the district of Louny. Ideal is SE or NW wind, but you can fly safely in entire range from E to S, or from W to N. The one thing is… it’s a one chance hill. You either get a thermal, or bomb out! And walking up at 30 degrees isn’t one of my (Daphne) favorite things so I just waited for Koos to land after a 2 hour flight.
Other usedful flying info:
Wind speeds – you can soar if the wind is more than 4 m/s and it’s better not to takeoff when the speed is over 8 m/s
Soaring – one or two hours before the sunset, there is quite high possibility of soaring in calm laminar air. It’ll most likely happen if the XCmeteo forecast shows soarable wind (around 5m/s) between 500 – 1000 meters AMSL.
If you want to know more about flying at Raná (50°24’25.2″N 13°46’45.4″E) and what documents you need, just go here.
Because we wanted Mickey to roam free and have some fun, we move to the other landing area, just on the other side of the hill. There were some obvious signs of people camping and making fire there, so we thought that it would be okay to make a campfire and try the Dutch Oven for baking our own bread.
All of a sudden two jeeps arrived and a friendly guy informed us about the european groundsquirrels, an endangered species and he feared that Mickey might catch one for dinner. He was kind enough to give us two other options to camp and we decided to move on. The weather forecast predicted lots of rain and we were already making plans to go further south.
We stop at one of the many castles in the area and find a poor brown bear in the rain. According to the information the bear is saved from dancing with a ring through it’s nose, but it’s still sad to see such a beautiful animal behind bars…
Time for some real flying action in Austria, one of our favorite sites, and more sunshine. But all about that in the next blog.
How do you take and edit your videos? They are quite good.
Thanks, we use mobile phones (Samsung S10+ and Iphone 6s), DJI Osmo 3 for the timelapses and Gopro Hero 5 for the action movies. It’s edited in Adobe Premiere Elements 2018.