Sunday, January 10, 2010

Valle Day 3 - great flying - quite quiet though


Day two was much more like what we had hoped for.

The day began with promise of 11k cloud base and overdevelopment. There were at least 150 pilots on launch and as soon as I figured I could stay up I boooggied.

It turned out to be a great call - the lines started and it took a long time to get off launch. I just bugged out. 30 seconds after my launch I found my vario not working - no known cause but it meant flying all day with no audio indication of up or down. This is good practice but it makes coring thermals very difficult.

Even with the loss of my primary instrument I was able to punch a hole in the sky that made me happy.

No one else was really heading out for El Pinon and I looked at my GPS and it said I was at 9k. and El Pinon was on easy glide so boogied out and I took the rock to 10k or so near and over the wall - never pushed back into the g spot cloud base was sooo low on the mesa that it was not the place to go. So I pushed strait for crazy and found nothing. I had to go back scratching below the G spot and worked back to El Pinon at near treetop for a save to well over 9K.

Now push back again but this time the clouds were socking in. Took a nice street all the way to the end of the ridge but ended up quite low - had to scratch and finally snagged a thermal thanks to a local. Got back over 8 and pushed south of 3 kings hoping to get to the mountains. But I was too low on the crossing and landed about 16k from launch - a very nice 1:45 min flight.

My driver back a bit of the way was 12 years old - his mom seemed ok with it. Then right into a pickup that got me to Jovan's by 3 - a quick lunch and 2 beers and back to launch for a glassoff.


The air was very active and some of our crew picked landing rather than flying 3 or 4 made it to the lake.

Great Job Ya All. I know Ralph, C.J. and Paul made lake landings. - WAY TO GO

More later.
Preacher

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