Spray day at Puuloa was very successful. When we got to the Mauna Kea Summit road junction around 8:30am it looked like clouds and moisture might be a problem. As it turned out the inversion was strong and below 6,500 feet so we had a magnificent sunny clear day on the mountain. A number of the club actually found time to fly between rounds of spraying. Thanks to our Pres Yeti Deffebach (pending Guiness book of records holder for most touch and goes landing a powered paraglider on an international airport) Peter Follet (his wing was a sight to behold, with clear blue skies, white puffy clouds and the mountain…) Charlie Crocker and Scott Gee (first to fly) Sam Blankenship and Roy Volkoff (students kiting in catabatics before it warmed up) MY Instructor Shawn Baker and DON BARTON one of our founding fathers of paragliding on Mauna Kea!

It took only one supercharged 3 gallon spray load to hose every piece of living gorse I could find in and around the summit of Puuloa. Last year it took two loads. We are winning the battle but we will not win the war without continued perserverance. There are camoflage keiki’s sprouting which will take over the moment we turn our backs! Easy enough to kill, if we keep on it. Otherwise the gorse wins. The koa trees which Charlie has be spraying around look just great! We still need to attack the roadway coming up so that we don’t drag gorse seeds with our vehicles.

Please beware of wild bulls. I was working my way down the south side of Puuloa and ran into 3 ornery abandoned pissed off old bulls. Luckily I was over 100 feet above them. The off-white bull looked me in the eye and basically said he would kill me if I came any closer. I slipped away out of his sight to the east. He was not going to run uphill to ruin my day. Neillybird

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