I still remember the first time I saw a paraglider. I was on a hillside — I won't say exactly where, because the details have blurred in the twenty-five years since — but I remember the wing. It was green and white. The pilot ran three or four steps and lifted off without drama, without noise, without fuss, and became part of the sky. I watched for about forty minutes. I knew on the spot that I was going to do this.
Learning to Fly — The Early Years
I signed up for my first course about three weeks after that moment on the hillside. I had no idea what to expect. The first day was nothing but running down slopes in a field, dragging a trainer wing through long grass, learning what it felt like to have fabric and lines above my head. It was humbling in a way I hadn't anticipated. I had imagined the first lesson would feel like flying. Instead it felt like fighting — fighting the wing, fighting the wind, fighting my own instincts about when to run and when to brake.
The instructor was patient but direct. He told me early on: the wing doesn't lie to you, but it speaks quietly — you have to learn to listen. I didn't understand what he meant at the time. I was too busy trying to remember the sequence of checks, the inflation technique, the brake positions. There is so much to hold in your head as a beginner that the sky almost becomes secondary. You're managing checklists in a body that wants to panic.
My first solo flight — by which I mean the first time I genuinely left the ground and flew without someone holding a training line — lasted maybe forty seconds. I launched from a gentle slope, floated out over the landing field, and touched down in roughly the right place. When I unclipped from the harness my hands were shaking. Not from fear, exactly. More from the realisation that this was actually real. I had actually done it. I was going to spend a lot of my life doing this.
The months that followed were a steep learning curve in the truest sense. I made mistakes — some of them small and recoverable, a couple of them the kind that stay with you. There was one afternoon when I launched in conditions that were turning thermic before I had the experience to read that. The wing surged forward on the way up, I over-corrected, the launch was rough, and I came down harder than I should have about fifty metres from where I intended. No injury, but a clear message: my confidence was outpacing my understanding. I spent the next two weekends on the ground, watching, talking to more experienced pilots, studying what the air was doing on days I would previously have just flown on.
That willingness to not fly — to sit out a day that other, more experienced pilots were using — was probably one of the most important decisions I made in my development as a pilot. You learn more from a bad day you didn't fly than from a good day you squeezed in when you shouldn't have.
Discovering Cross-Country Flying
For the first couple of years I was what you'd call a soaring pilot. Ridge lift, coastal lift, staying within glide range of the landing field. Safe, enjoyable, satisfying. But I started to notice that some pilots would disappear. They'd launch, gain height on the ridge, and then just keep going — drifting inland, getting smaller and smaller until they were a speck. Then they'd call someone for a retrieve from a field twenty kilometres away. This looked like a completely different relationship with the sky.
My first real cross-country flight happened on a day that had been building slowly. I was on a site I knew well, the cumulus were forming inland, and the conditions were — for the first time in my flying — clearly inviting me to leave. I climbed on the ridge, drifted back to work a weak thermal behind the hill, and for the first time felt that subtle upward pull that means you've found something. I circled, the vario beeped, and I climbed three hundred metres above the ridge top. Below me the road I normally drove to the launch site was a thin line. The village looked like a map.
I flew for about an hour. I covered around eighteen kilometres — nothing by modern XC standards, but to me it felt like crossing a continent. I landed in a field of sunflowers, completely alone, about four kilometres from the nearest road. I sat there for twenty minutes before I called anyone. I needed that time.
After that day everything changed. I bought a variometer — a proper one, not the basic beeper I'd been using. I started reading weather models every morning, not just checking whether it would rain. I discovered Skysight and XCSkies, learned what a good XC sounding looked like, started to understand how the thermal cycle in different terrains varies through the day. I began downloading my track logs after every flight and spending time with them — comparing what I thought was happening in the air with what the GPS trace was actually showing. That gap between perceived reality and recorded reality is where most improvement happens.
Cross-country flying doesn't make you a braver pilot. It makes you a more curious one. You stop thinking about the landing field and start thinking about the whole sky as navigable terrain.
The Competition Years
I entered my first competition more or less by accident. A friend signed up for a regional Portuguese league round and needed a fourth person to make up numbers for a shared retrieve car. I entered to be useful. I finished near the bottom of the results. I couldn't sleep for two days afterward because I kept replaying every decision I'd made on task.
That was the beginning. There is something about competition paragliding that forces you to confront your flying in a way that recreational flying never quite does. In a comp, every pilot launches at the same time, flies the same task, in the same conditions. There is nowhere to hide. The difference between a pilot who finishes in the top third and one who finishes in the bottom third is not always physical ability or equipment — it is usually decision-making under pressure.
What competition taught me, above everything else, was the mental game. Managing the anxiety of a start gate when thirty pilots are circling in a gaggle, everyone waiting for the clock. Choosing when to leave the pack and take a line nobody else is taking — and being wrong about it, losing two kilometres, having to fight your way back into the glide. Learning to fly your own race rather than following the crowd, because the crowd is often wrong.
I competed in Portuguese national league rounds for several seasons and reached a point where I was placing consistently in the top quarter of open-class fields. I flew at a handful of international events in Europe as well — enough to understand how the top-level pilots think and what separates them from the rest of us. The gap at that level is not talent, exactly. It is hours. Thousands of hours, accumulated over years, in every type of condition, in every type of terrain. There are no shortcuts.
But more valuable than any result was what those years taught me about risk management. Competition paragliding is not reckless flying — the top competitors are among the most methodical, disciplined risk managers in the sport. They know exactly where their margins are. They know when a line is worth trying and when it isn't. They have developed, through repetition, an almost unconscious ability to read the air and match their decisions to it. That is what I took from competition into the rest of my flying life, and into my coaching.
Why Sesimbra
I had flown in a lot of places before I came to Sesimbra. Mountains in central and northern Portugal. Inland sites in the Alentejo. A few places in Spain. Some time in the Alps. All of them beautiful, all of them interesting. But when I first flew the coastal ridge here, something felt different.
Sesimbra sits on the Atlantic coast about 35 kilometres south of Lisbon. The ridge that faces the ocean creates a consistent band of lift that, on the right day, can be worked for hours. The microclimate here is unlike anything I've found elsewhere on the Iberian coast. The northwest trade winds that funnel in from the Atlantic provide reliable soaring conditions for more of the year than almost anywhere else I've flown in Portugal. And because the sites face west and northwest, the morning sun doesn't heat the launch too early — the thermal cycle is manageable, predictable, workable.
Within fifteen minutes of the main launch there are four or five usable sites in different wind directions. When the main ridge is too strong, there's a sheltered site inland. When conditions are light and northerly, there's a site that picks up exactly that. This variety means that a week based here is almost never wasted — there is almost always somewhere sensible to fly, even when the headline conditions look marginal.
But Sesimbra was not just a flying decision. It was a life decision. I arrived here and found a fishing village that hadn't lost itself. The seafood at the small restaurants along the harbour is extraordinary. The pace of life is what the Portuguese call sossegado — calm, unhurried. People here know their neighbours. The hills behind the town are quiet in the morning. You can walk out at dawn and hear nothing but birds and the distant sound of the Atlantic.
I was not planning to stay permanently. But I kept extending my time here, season after season, until the question of leaving stopped arising. This is home. The flying brought me here; the place kept me.
The Decision to Guide
For a long time I flew for myself. I flew with friends, I flew competitions, I flew early mornings alone on the ridge when the conditions were perfect and I wanted no company except the wing and the air. That was enough. I didn't think about coaching.
The first time I guided someone was informal — a friend of a friend, an intermediate pilot who had plateaued. He'd been flying for two years but felt like he wasn't improving. He came out for a week and I flew alongside him, watching his inputs, talking to him on the radio, going through his track logs with him in the evenings. By the end of the week he was flying differently. Not dramatically — but the quality of his decisions had shifted. He was reading the air rather than reacting to it.
What I discovered in that week was something I hadn't expected: coaching another pilot through a breakthrough is as satisfying as any personal achievement in competition. Possibly more so. There is something specific about the moment when a pilot who has been struggling with a skill — thermal centring, maybe, or the go/no-go decision — suddenly gets it. You can hear it in the radio. The voice changes. The questions stop being anxious and start being curious.
I started running small groups. I kept them small deliberately — never more than five or six pilots. I wanted to be able to fly with everyone, give everyone radio time, review everyone's track logs. A programme with twelve pilots would be a different thing entirely. It might be commercially logical, but it wouldn't be what I wanted to offer.
If you want to understand what a coaching week looks like in practice, I've written about that separately. But the short version is: it's structured around the conditions, not the calendar. We fly when it's good. We debrief seriously. We don't waste flying days sitting in a classroom.
My pilot biography covers the formal side — the certifications, the competition record, the hours. This is the human side of the same story.
Things I Know Now That I Didn't Know When I Started
Patience beats bravery, every single time. There's a pilot I flew competitions with in my thirties who was consistently more aggressive than me on start gates, more willing to push into questionable conditions. He was also a better technical pilot. He stopped flying in 2011 after a serious accident. I am still flying. The pilots who last — who are still in the air at sixty-five and seventy — are not the bold ones. They are the patient ones. They know how to sit out a day without feeling like they've failed. That knowledge only comes from time, and sometimes from close calls that you don't forget.
The go/no-go decision is the most important skill a pilot develops. More important than thermalling technique, more important than wing handling. A pilot who makes consistently good launch decisions in average conditions will outlast and outscore a more technically gifted pilot who makes bad ones. I see this clearly from guiding: the pilots who improve fastest are usually the ones willing to say, in front of others, "I don't think I should fly today." That takes confidence of a different kind.
Small groups are not a constraint — they are the product. The reason I run the Coastal Soaring Week and XC Coaching in groups of five or six is not because I can't find more clients. It's because with more than six pilots, the level of individual attention I can give collapses. I can't fly with all twelve of you. I can't debrief all twelve track logs meaningfully. Small groups are where the coaching actually happens.
Radio coaching is transformative. Most pilots have received ground instruction and post-flight debrief. Very few have received real-time coaching in the air. There is a moment in every session when a pilot does something well — finds the core of a thermal cleanly, reads a wind shift correctly — and I say so immediately over the radio. That moment of affirmation, connected directly to the sensation they're experiencing, creates learning in a way that no amount of evening classroom time can replicate.
Track log analysis is the most underused tool in paragliding improvement. I look at every pilot's track log after every flight. Not to mark it, not to grade it. To find the moments where the line taken and the line available were different — where a better decision existed and went untaken. Most pilots review their tracks for the distance or the altitude. I look for the decision points.
Never fix the flying schedule weeks in advance. I plan close. I confirm the day's flying the morning of, based on the actual conditions as they've developed, not the forecast from Tuesday. This frustrates some pilots at first. They want to know on Monday whether Wednesday will be an XC day or a soaring day. I understand the desire for certainty. But the weather doesn't consult our itinerary. Flying close to the forecast rather than the actual conditions is one of the most common mistakes I see from intermediate pilots — and from some guiding operations that have committed to a pre-sold programme.
A Message to Anyone Considering Their First Week Here
If you're reading this because you're thinking about flying here — whether you've found the site through a search, through Instagram, or through a recommendation — here is what I can offer you honestly.
I know these sites in a way that only accumulates through thousands of flights. I know where the rotor forms on the eastern ridge when the wind has a northerly component. I know which thermal triggers fire first in the morning cycle and which ones are reliable only after noon. I know the three backup sites within twenty minutes that most visitors never discover because they don't know to look for them. That knowledge is what you're buying when you fly with me — not just my company in the air, but years of site-specific experience that would take you a very long time to accumulate on your own.
What I ask in return is simple. Tell me honestly about your flying level — not the level you aspire to, the level you're at. I've been told people were more advanced than they were, and I've been told people were more basic than they were. Both create problems. If you tell me you fly 100 hours a year and you actually fly 30, I will put you in conditions that will be too demanding. If you undersell yourself, we'll spend two days on the soaring ridge when you were ready for XC from day one. Honesty about where you are makes the week better for everyone.
Be willing to take direction in the air. I will coach you on the radio. I will sometimes tell you to do something counterintuitive. I will sometimes tell you to land when you feel like you have more flying in you. Trust that the instruction is based on what I can see from my position in the air, which is often different from what you can feel from inside the wing.
And be willing to have non-flying days. Not every day here is a flying day, and I will never push a group into the air on a day that doesn't meet my standard. Those days usually become good days for ground handling, for site visits, for track log review, for a long lunch at a harbour restaurant with fish that was caught that morning. They are not wasted days. But if you need a guarantee of seven flying days in seven days, I am not the right person to fly with.
What you will take home from a week here is not just better flying. It is a clearer understanding of what flying actually asks of you — as a weather reader, as a decision-maker, as someone who has chosen to spend their free time doing something that demands their full attention. That understanding is what separates a pilot who improves from one who simply accumulates hours.
I look forward to flying with you.