1997 World Hot Air Balloon Championship, Saga Japan

I'm on a roll of uploading videos to YouTube. Here is a short video I edited from some of Kath's videos.

2006 Worlds Video

I finally got around to compressing this video (not the greatest compression) and put it up onto YouTube last night. In case you were wondering, the music is by The Cruel Sea.

Back flying again.

The flying season has officially started again. On Thursday afternoon, we packed up the car and headed down to Benalla (Victoria) , with a stop over night at Binalong. Why Benalla? Well that is where the Nationals are going to be in July. I hadn't been ballooning at Benalla since I was 15 in 1990, so I thought it would be worth scoping it out before the Nationals.

It was a very hot weekend (mid 30s), so we only got to fly Saturday and Sunday mornings. Both flights were very enjoyable and all up managed to get about 3 hours of flying time.

The big thing about the weekend was that I flew our 77 for the first time in nearly a year. Last year I managed to put a few holes in it on a tree and hadn't bothered getting it fixed as I had been flying the Kavanagh EX-65 leading up to and during the worlds. It was certainly different flying the lumpy 77 again. I definitely need to do a bit of flying in it before the Nationals.

It was a great weekend. I am now getting excited about the Nationals.