WHAT A JOB:Pauline Baker, who had dreams of flying as a child, found her calling in ballooning. The record-breaker talks to CLAIRE O'CONNELLahead of the national championships
IT ALL STARTED with a broken dishwasher. “I hate washing dishes, and I left them for a couple of days. Then I thought I’d better do them,” recalls Pauline Baker of that fateful day.
While she was staring out the window over a pile of sudsy crockery, she spotted an orange hot-air balloon on the horizon. She ditched her Marigolds, jumped into her jeep and chased the aircraft as it glided over the Meath countryside.
“It suddenly clicked that ballooning was exactly what I wanted to do,” says Baker, who had already invested much time and effort trying to capture an airborne sensation she had hankered after since childhood.
“As a kid I always dreamed that I was a bird. When I’d go to bed at night I’d fly – I’d be swooping around the trees and down on the water. Then I used to look at the birds flying during the day, and I thought ‘I’d love to be able to glide and soar’,” she recalls.
“So I tried everything I could – a parachute jump, skydiving, then I got involved with paragliding and fixed-wing flying, but I still couldn’t find anything that would bring me close to that feeling of being a bird.”
So when the orange balloon came into focus, she followed her dream. “I went in and out different side roads, keeping up with the balloon all the time. After about an hour they landed, and I went out into the field and I got talking to the pilot, who had spotted me following them,” she says.
In return for helping out with the ground crew, Baker earned a flight in the balloon, and instantly knew she had found what she had been looking for.
Fifteen years on, Baker is still a self-confessed “balloonatic”. She holds almost 100 Irish titles and no fewer than nine international records for distance, duration and altitude. She owns eight balloons, ranging from a 275,000-cubic-feet giant down to a relatively tiny 9,000-cubic-feet AX-1 craft she calls Bubbles, which she uses to set international records.
Unofficially, Baker has soared to 22,000ft in a flight over the Alps. “It was -40 degrees,” she recalls. “The air was so clear, but after being up there for about 10 or 15 minutes you really start to feel the cold.”
She is similarly matter-of-fact when relating tales of her official record-breaking adventures. “I was doing a distance record and I was going down a valley in Italy, flying into Austria. I had to climb to go over a hill, and I hit severe turbulence, so the balloon started to swing like a pendulum, and I was losing an awful lot of heat out of it,” she says.
Baker went to grab her lighter so she could reignite the balloon if needed, but in a heart- stopping moment it fell. “I looked at it falling down into the mountain below and I thought, ‘this is it’,” she says. “At a point like that it is life-threatening, and you think ‘this could be curtains for me’, and ‘I’m going to die’. Your life doesn’t flash in front of you – it’s amazing, you actually go into survival mode. I was looking around thinking ‘how can I get out of this, where can I land, how can I survive?’ ”
Baker ended up burning panels in the balloon to get more heat. “There was burning fabric coming down on top of me, because I had to get heat into the balloon. I got it stabilised eventually and I got heat back into it, and down into the next valley, and it was calm. So I flew for another half an hour until I got to the next mountain, and I wasn’t going over that! I landed and I actually got the record, but that’s how extreme and how dangerous it can be.”
Her day job as operations director of Irish Balloon Flights tends to be less hair-raising. Generally the commercial company brings passengers to between 1,000-2,000ft on the hour-long flights, and Baker still feels the thrill each time they prepare and launch.
Committed balloonatics still flock here for the annual national championships, which take place in Waterford on September 20th to 25th.
“The championships in Ireland is a really fun event for pilots. It’s not too competitive, it’s about having fun,” says Baker. “It’s not just about ballooning, it’s the social aspect as well. They land in a field at 6am, a farmer comes out and brings them in for breakfast, the cup of tea is always on the go. I hope it always stays like that.”
The 39th Irish Ballooning Championships will take place in Waterford and south Kilkenny from Sunday, September 20th, to Friday, September 25th. See www.waterfordballooningclub.com, or tel: 087-9300700 for information. Irish Balloon Flights offer commercial balloon trips year round. See www.balloons.ie for more information