First tow on the 7th of december 2003.

On the evening of the 6th of december 2003 I managed to tie a black-and-white mini-cam into my wing. The mini-cam is tied to an A-line, it's battery to a B-line, and the video cable then runs along that B-line towards my harness, where the handycam is located.

The connector near the camera was probably not fully seated. This means that during interesting moments, the connection failed, the mini-cam lost power, and reset. It then takes a couple of seconds to regain its automatic exposure control setting. I've cut most of these segments out. That's why the video goes from "preparing to launch" to "flying" in an instant.

The video below is my (actually the) first flight of that day. There is a strong cross-wind from the right. Due to the canals in the fields, we don't have the option of rotating the winch-and-start through 50 or so degrees as would have been better that day.

In the video, you see:

Moving from aside the launch to the launch place.
A launch attempt. As our instructor wanted me to demo a normal forward launch with a strong side-wind, I let the tow-force go up quite a lot before attempting the launch (This is more or less standard practise with us! It's just that I can manage to let the force build up a bit higher than average...) At the moment I can't hold it anymore the instructor shouts "stop, stop, stop". I hear this directly, but not over the radio. I start running and turn my head to tell him: "you better shout that over the radio, the tow-operator can't hear you". Apparently, one of the dogs was running between my lines. As the camera went off the moment I took off, you'll see me prepare to launch, then there are 2 or three frames with a dog between the lines. Then you'll see the wing with the lower-surface towards the grass.
The wing is then dragged back to the start: I "landed" quite close to the next canal, and I didn't want to lose that space while being blown aside by the cross-wind.
A new launch. Again the camera goes off during the most interesting time. :-(
The tow. As you can see, I get blown aside to the left.
A small wingover, a fast 360.
At that point I've drifted off the field a bit, and have to "struggle" a while to get back.
landing. (too close to the canal for my liking).