Generation Dune

It felt like the bottom had fallen out of my harness. The sand came rushing up toward me and the whistling sound of the sea breeze turned into a roar. I pulled my hands down again, feathered the dive and was skimming inches above the beach at an unsettling speed. Pulling further, I was thrown up above the dune again before coming to a complete stop in a hover; suspended above the flattest, most improbable landscape to be pushing the edges of this sport.

Back home in the UK, I always thought of soaring as a step along the way to “going XC”. It was a way to get your hours up and qualify, not something to do for its own sake. The dune I was flying would barely register as a ridge. A low, scrubby mound of sand, perhaps...