I went to get paraglider training because there was no standardized paramotor training and I wanted better than that. Jeff Williams became my first instructor and helped me discover that soaring a paraglider was really cool, which for a guy who started in sailplanes, was super bonus! You could stay up for hours and it wasn’t much different from sailplane thermalling, save the fact that you could feel the air–another bonus. Jeff was a gem.
Nick Scholtes got to me to join him on a paragliding trip with his instructor Alan Chuculate which I did. Alan and his wife, Mary Hobson, turned out to be gems that soon became good friends and Alan would be a big influence on my flying – more accurately on my love for ground handling.
This was probably my first trip and I bought my first digital camera: a Mavica. That’s why we even have these shots. It had a floppy disk drive with a walloping 720k of space: DOUBLE what earlier disks had. I could store 10 pictures at full resolution. It was awesome.
Pictures below were from my first trip to fly with him and Alan Chuculate.
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- Nick Scholtes and Alan Chuculate
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- Jeff Goin with Alan Chuculate at a San Diego launch site
