Episode 154- Going Big against the Odds with Thad Spencer

This spring when Bill Belcourt and I were recording the show with Mitch McAleer out in California I got a chance to fly (or more accurately- be OUTflown) in the desert with my X-Alps supporter Reavis Sutphin-Gray and Thad Spencer, who I’d met originally in Colombia and have come across in various parts of the world chasing the sky crack. Every time we’ve gotten together I quickly devolve into a puddle of tears from laughing. Thad hails from Minnesota, just sold a successful musical production company and is addicted to flying. The holy grail in the US has been the 200 mile mark, and Thad has chased it hard for years. His chase has taken him through the full arc of what you have to learn to send, an arc that of course never ends. This spring he pulled it off in the flats of the MidWest with a 228 mile (very cold) beauty. A little while after he pulled it off he sent me an email that I’ve posted here nearly in full because…well because we all need a good laugh now and then and it’s what lead to this show. Thad tells the “and there I was…” story better than most. Grab a whiskey and tuck in, you’re in for a treat. From Thad Spencer: How an Addle Brained Idiot from Minnesota Flew 228 Miles Learning to fly a paraglider in Minnesota is certainly not ideal. It’s really flat here. I mean glacially scraped within an inch of its life flat. Years back, when I had decided to take up the sport, there was a complete lack of paragliding culture in the state, a profound absence of hills or mountains, and no available training. All of my early years of training and flying required traveling on a jet to somewhere more suitable for paragliding. This made my learning progression kind of stunted and staggered. I would get these concentrated bursts of flying experience followed by months of inactivity. If I was going to progress more quickly I decided that I needed to figure out how I could fly where I lived.  Around this time, while on a flying trip with friends in Washington and Oregon, I had the opportunity to tow behind a truck using a payout winch. Up to this point I had only launched my paraglider from hills and mountains. The idea of launching via tow was revelatory! So I got busy trying to put together some method of towing back in Minnesota. My first attempt was to make a homemade scooter tow. I found a vintage Honda Elite 150CC scooter. I removed the front wheel and took the tire off the back wheel and welded two plates on the hub to turn it into a receptacle for tow line. I then mounted the entire rig onto an old boat trailer so I could move it around. I found a small grass strip ultralight field outside the city. The guy who ran it, Dan Mattson, said he would be willing to help tow me up on the thing. I knew absolutely fuck-all about pay-in towing. So Dan and I just kind of figured it out through trail and error. Pay-in towing on a 1700 foot grass runway is no easy task. Given the length of the field and the physical limitations of pay-in towing, I was unable to get more than 300 to 400 feet per tow. This made every flight a full on seat of your pants low-ass save. It did climb out to base a few times, but more often than not each tow was a sledder. The next evolution towards my goal of towing in Minnesota happened while I was looking to purchase a pay-out winch. During my search I found someone on the internet who was making a winch that used an electric particle brake to apply precise tension on the line drum. His name was Steve Serine and he lived in Minnesota. I couldn’t believe it! Meeting Steve changed everything for me. He had this amazing tow winch, he was retired and therefore available to go out flying any time, and he was a proficient paragliding pilot. We became fast friends and began towing and flying all over the state.