Who says you need wings to fly?

Published in The Cottage Times, August 2008

I woke up for the third day in a row, thinking, this is going to be the day I go hang gliding. When I first made the call to High Perspective, a company that does tandem hang gliding flights out of both Pickering and Muskoka, I wasn’t the least bit nervous. I’d done rock climbing, wakeskating, and various other daring activities this summer, so hang gliding didn’t seem too intimidating at the time.

Well, that was before I spent two full days in suspense, waiting for what was sure to be the experience of a lifetime. The first day I had booked to fly high above Muskoka’s in nothing but an oversized kite with Michael, the owner of High Perspective, it rained, pretty much blowing our chances of flying that day. The second day, the winds were far too strong to chance flying up, up and literally, away. By the third day, I was more ready than ever, but after 48 hours of considering the risks, more dubious than ever as well.

What if the harness broke? What if I got up in the air and a sudden storm arrives? What if something, anything, goes wrong and we are there, gliding thousands of feet above ground, with nothing but the lake to break our fall? What on earth had I agreed to do?

On the big day, Jan, the photographer and I drove out to Cleveland’s House and met Michael and his crew on the end of the dock. There it was, the boat that was to pull me to my destiny, tied up to the end of the dock with the hang glider resting innocently on the back platform. When I was asked if I’d like to come along in the boat while Michael took the woman signed up ahead of me for her hang glide, I readily agreed, eager to see what it was all about before I made the final decision to be strapped in.

Perhaps that was a mistake. As I watched Michael and his passenger glide further and further away from us on their ascent into the sky, never could I have imagined the hang glider could go that high. It was going to take all the nerve I could muster not to back out.

When it came my turn, we returned to the dock where I signed my life away on the release form and slipped into the provided wetsuit. After Michael’s partner suited me up with a helmet and the harness that secured me to the glider, my excitement mounted. Every step closer we came to takeoff, the butterflies in my stomach would multiply but my thoughts were more about how exciting it would be than how scary.

I climbed onto the platform and Michael clipped me in to a large caribiner that was attached to the glider. He showed me how, in the chance we got flipped over upon landing in the water, to unattach myself, assuring me that this was a very rare occurrence. Next thing I knew, we were laying down in our harnesses, my right arm wrapping around Michael’s back as he gave word for the boat to go.

As soon as the boat took off, my fears were gone. This was going to be awesome.

When the boat hit the required speed for takeoff, Michael gave the signal and his crew detached us from the boat. Within seconds we were gliding through the air, still attached to the vessel by a thin rope, climbing higher and higher into the sky. Before long, we reached the desired height of somewhere around 1000 feet above water and traveling at a speed of 35 miles an hour, and Michael dropped the rope free of the kite. We were hang gliding.

“Look around us,” Michael said, as he snapped a few pictures from the camera attached to the wing. “Isn’t that something?”

I looked around and never before had I seen a sight like this. The only way to describe it is like being in a plane, but free of walls, seats, restraints and a captain. The air rushed by my ears creating a whooshing sound as I looked into the distance and spotted Georgian Bay, not very far away. Below us, islands were the size of quarters and the boat from which we took off was but a mere speck in the vast, blue water.

As we glided through the air, Michael pointed out Lake Joseph and told me to watch our shadow as it passed over the lake, the trees and snuck right over the deck of an unsuspecting cottage. From our perspective, even Red Leaves looked tiny. At one point, my tandem partner let me take the wheel, so to speak, and showed me that with the slightest movement of our bodies we could go left, right, and even faster or slower.

As we grew closer to the lake, Michael told me to prepare for landing. Though it appeared we descending at a frightening speed, we touched down on the lake with nothing but a soft splash. The warm water tickled my toes as the boat pulled up to collect us from where we lay.

As I climbed aboard, I was smiling like a clown and felt a rush like never before. I couldn’t wait to get back to land so I could tell everyone about what an amazing experience hang gliding had been. My only regret was how much time I spent worrying, instead of realizing that when I am flying with a man who has over 15,000 flights under his belt, I’m in pretty good hands.