Geoff writes: an interesting day (for us, if not for other people), with a mixture of work, flying and conflict with the paramilitary police.

The work is doing the final edit on a web cast/multimedia site guide. We’ve been thinking about doing web casts for a while, for topics which need more than just the audio available in the podcasts (e.g. weather, RASP), so decided to produce multimedia descriptions of LMSC sites. The first one, a kind of experiment, is now finished. It can be seen here.

For the flying, on what was a warm, sunny day, we went to Sant Pere de Rodes, the nice spineback ridge by the coast. As well as Nani, Jesus and Johnny, various Niviuk test pilots and designers turned up to fly, including Dominique (the Niviuk MD), Urban and Aljaz Valic (test pilots), Olivier Neff (designer), Simon Issenhuth and others. They came to this part of Spain because everywhere else in Europe has bad weather (except maybe Britain last week!). They had a couple of carbon wings with them, still under development, and it was interesting to see these. Incredible performance. We all launched off the south side first – not epic, but most people stayed up for a while and got above launch, in spite of some high cloud coming in. Eventually, all bottom landed.

We all went up again, and flew off the north side. I was first off, and soared a bit, then went to land in the car park by the beach, where we always land in a northerly. The others all landed there too. As we were packing up, drinking beers and discussing which bar to go to, a Guardia Civil car drove past, did a U-turn, and came into the car park. For those who don’t know much about Spain, the Guardia Civil were the paramilitary police force which, after the civil war ended in victory for the Fascists, were used to violently oppress those areas which had opposed Franco – which included Catalunya. They aren’t as vicious as they used to be, in the new democratic Spain, but you wouldn’t want to get on their wrong side. And, clearly, they have switched from fighting the Spanish resistance, to oppressing paraglider pilots, who they said shouldn’t be landing in that car park (which has been used for years). Maybe they were just bored. All the pilots at this point were foreigners – us, French, Swiss, Slovenian, etc., not one Catalan or Spaniard, though that would have made no difference to their attitude. Dominique, to his credit, started arguing with them, whilst they were collecting everyone’s identity card, and checking them to make sure we were all legal.

We decided to play the stupid English tourists who speak no Spanish, and gradually crept off to the van, whilst they were arguing with Dominique, hoping they wouldn’t notice us. We got as far as the van, but when we started the engine, they shouted at us to stop, so we did. They had guns.

In the end, it all came to nothing – they gave everyone their ID back, and eventually went off, after Dominique told them we’d be flying again there tomorrow. It wasted maybe an hour of our time, and was a staggering display of arrogance, and completely pointless. And hardly a good advert for a country which wants more tourists to rescue an economy which is an even worse shape than Britain’s. (Mind you, as far as I know, you can still take photos in Spain without being arrested, which certainly isn’t the case in Britain. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2010/feb/21/police-arrest-photographer for another display of pointless harassment, this time in the UK, where every photographer is now treated as a potential terrorist).

So, all in all, an interesting and, mostly, enjoyable day! And the forecast is very good for the next week or two.

See photos of today.

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