An exceptional day when I was participating in the national championships in Porterville in 1991.
I was flying along the ridge, when I saw a blue paraglider low down… It was close to the cliff and suddenly it hits it!
Immediately, I radio my Austrian friends who came with me from Europe and naively ask them to send a helicopter to rescue the pilot… A few minutes later, my friends ask me to land near the pilot to determine the severity of his injuries.
I’m not too keen on landing in the bushes at the top of the cliff. I have been told at length about baboons, which can be quite aggressive, and black mambas, which are extremely dangerous snakes…
I land in some bushes of almost 2 m high. I leave my glider there and go down the cliff to find the pilot who has a broken tibia. I talk to him as best I can, for many hours while waiting for help…
My Austrian friends finally arrive with the medical service. They transport the injured man in a kind of sarcophagus: there is no possibility of having a helicopter. It’s not like in the Alps at all!
Once the ambulance has left, I ask about the state of my paraglider that my friends have kindly retrieved. They tell me that it was not damaged, but that there is something very special that they don’t understand: a line is not connected to a link at all…
This “rescue” earned me a little pride and 1000 points in the round. I won the competition (I was already in the lead before this last round), but only in the “open” category, because I am not South African…
A very unusual flight that deeply marked my first years of paragliding and that I gladly tell at the end of the evening…
Eric Laforge
