Soaring Trip to Grass Island (Tap Mun)
1 February, 2004

A soaring trip to Grass Island (Tap Mun) on Sunday, 1 February, 2003 was organized. About 10 r/c soarers and their guests joined the trip to this beautiful island. The trip started early in Sunday morning as fellow pilots converged in Wong Shek Pier in Sai Kung for taking the 10:00am ferry to Grass Island.  We arrived at the slope at about 10:30am and immediately noticed that the wind was virtually nil. We played with our handlaunch glider while waiting for the wind God to help. After two hours of waiting, we felt a bit disappoint and went down to the village for lunch.  We came back up to the slope after lunch and soon discovered that the condition was even worse as the wind direction was changed to west and also varying, so we continued to play with our handlaunch glider for spot landing. After another hour or so, the wind started to pick up to about 10 km/hr so everybody launched their gliders immediately. Wow! It's wonderful! The sky over the island was suddenly full of gliders. Onlookers to this remote island were impressed with the ability of our powerless gliders to have such stunning aerobatic capability. After about one hour of intense soaring, the wind soon to weaken again, so at 4:00pm we decided to pack up our stuff and heading home.


A group photo at the slope in Grass Island


"We aree waiting to show off our skill"


Stephen was able to fly longer than the others because of his light weight Illusion, but very unfortunately, this beautiful plane was finally destroyed by a "collision" on the ground with another fellow pilot!


Luckily Chester has bought a handlaunch gilder so that we still had lot of fun on the island


Ah Mak was practicing the discus launch technique - "not difficult to me" said Mak


Wow, It shot up to high attitude!


but was forced to land on the beach


Wow! This is a powerful launch of MiniCorado by Y.C.