Hike & Fly welcome to my life.

I haven’t been writing for some time now and is not like I’ve been grounded. I’ll start with the news about my first xc and pod harness Impress 3. I haven’t flown other pod harnesses so I wont be writing a blog about it since I can’t compare it with others, what I want to say is that I have zero complaints for now, it’s light, compact, warm and is gazillion times better than my previous harness advance progress from 2004.

Setting Up the I3 — **Photo by Saso Smilevski**

The thing that I am going to write about is Hike & fly.

I used to be a good endurance athlete back when i was 18 years old, however those days are over, now i consider myself as a strength athlete and endurance is just not my thing. But I have made a decision and this is going to change. The number one reason is Hike & Fly. This weekend me and Pero did our first hike and fly and it was AWESOME.

This was the main reason paragliding got invented, the only way you could say you traveled with zero fuel is Hike and fly or Vol Biv (but that’s another story). Everywhere in the world the number of people who are buying hike & fly equipment is seriously increasing. So why shouldn’t I do hike & fly and be an adventure athlete here, with all the mountains and natures, OK i don’t have lightweight equipment, mine weighs around 15 kg, but that is not big enough reason for me to stop.

I need a change, I want to be an adventure athlete. I love the sport of paragliding and I don’t think anything can beat our sport (don’t get me wrong, i have respect for every sports) but paragliding.. nothing compares with having a sneak peak at the birds world.

Now back to the point. This weekend me and Pero did our first hike & fly. It was done in Skopje, Macedonia on the local hill, Vodno 1000m ASL. We had serious fog in the morning but the forecast was indicating a change of wind direction as well as stronger wind from the N after 1 pm (which is good). We started the hike at 10:30 in the fog, with a small dose of doubt but determined to go all the way with this.

We climbed over the fog about 200 m from the summit and things started working for us. It took us 2h to the top and the conditions couldn’t be better. The fog cleared, the wind was 4m/s from the North, the excitement and the proud felt of making the decision to go all the way with our plan on a day like this was very high I must say. We took off and it was the most enjoyable winter flight ever.