RE: How important is "Ground handling" in paragliding?
As a novice pilot it took me a while to realize how weak I was at kiting - when you're learning you're often in a rush to get in the air and get flight numbers and hours checked off. Once I started trying to kite on my own with no one else around me and no instructor I found I just didn't have the skills I needed to be good at it. Even if one of those skills was when not to even try to bring up the wing (plus this was 14 years ago with a crappy 1999 design wing that was super heavy and slow as a bus). I then devoted a lot of time to getting much, much better at kiting (I wouldn't say mastering). If there is one thing I hear more advanced pilots say it is "I don't kite enough" (and the other is "I really should do an SIV course").
Even after thinking I'd nailed kiting, years later a bad habit I'd developed caused me to have a serious accident which combined with equipment failure could easily have killed me or left me a vegetable.
My mantra now is "Always be kiting and always be learning!"
Did you get picked up on launch? Or what happened?
I took off in high wind and was not able to penetrate and was not able to get to my speedbar easily so I landed. When trying to bring the wing down I reached for the brakes underestimating the potential for a drag. I also had left my gloves in the car and was not able to pull lines in. I got yanked off my feet, pulled sideways and hit my head going backwards.
I came around about 40 minutes later being strapped onto a back board and loaded into a helicopter. My full face helmet plastic buckle had broken at some point, the helmet came off and my face was dragged a few hundred feet over rocks, mud and grass.
I only broke two bones - my nose and the interior bone under my left eye which is no permanently dilated due to the impact. I was a bloody mess but lived to tell the tale.
Wow! That is rough! Glad you are ok. That could have been the end. Thanks for sharing that. Do you still fly?
Yes, I got back to flying a couple of months after the accident. My neck got very beaten up from the accident - major whiplash I guess - and to this day I have issues looking around. But it is good to be alive and flying even if I still have some major angst when the wind is strong. But I force myself to kite and be very aggressive in killing the wing with Cs, like my life depended on it - which I now know it does.