XC from The Pines

Today was interesting - I was heading to Bright when I got a call from Alex who was coming up from Mansfield and we decided to fly The Pines instead of Mystic.

There were some good cycles coming through on launch but wouldn't you know it, once we were set up and standing in the sun it all died down or came through from the west... After waiting for ages I thought I had a handle of the timing of the cycles and launched when one should have been just out the front. Instead, there was 2m/s of sink just out the front. I rode this down towards the pines below, but instead of flying towards the car edged deeper in over the pines (downwind).
There had to be a thermal lifting off from those pine trees somewhere - and once I was over them I stopped sinking but wasn't really climbing much. But the trees were just baking in the sun and near the middle of the plantation there was a bit of a clearing with a dam in it - I drifted towards it, hoping that the change in air temp caused by the water, plus the shelter from the wind caused by the trees all around would have to result in a thermal. By now I had totally abandoned the idea of landing near the car - it was a paddock away, upwind, but if I could just find a thermal it'd all be alright... And... I did!! A tight little 1-2m/s climb that was being pushed by the SW wind up the hills. I followed it until I lost it around 1,100m before heading back for the launch hill - surely one of the best trigger points around!
But... no it wasn't. There was some light lift around it, but I was going down. I thought of top-landing to get a better feel of what the wind was doing, but did one turn too many in the wrong direction and was below launch. After a couple of low climbs that petered out I finally got a good thermal (from the same clearing as before) and took it back up above the hill. The SW wind was picking up and I drifted a ways, but once at the top of the climb headed West along the hills and then over the back.

Why I flew this way I'm not sure - it would have been much smarter to fly with the wind towards the bigger hills and better clouds...

...where I could hear over the radio other pilots were having fun in the air. Instead I pushed West towards the blue sky. Maybe I need to add "Brain in gear?" to my pre-flight checklist??

Anyway, I got low, spent an age circling down above a cropped paddock with a big tree on a small hill in the middle of it before getting another climb, drifting with it from the SW wind before heading West again, climbed out above a vinyard, crossed a big chunk of bush...

...to another thermal off a vinyard, flew over hills, got another climb, got low as I was flying towards a town that the GPS said was Eldorado and arrived over the town about 300m AGL.

I circled just over a little hill with a house on it before losing the light lift and heading towards a nice looking LP near a shop when light lift pulled me downwind - of course I drifted with it over the town towards some hills behind it when WHAM! One side of the wing lurched as a fist of air punched it upwards - I jabbed the brake to spin into the rest of it and got a brief roller-coaster ride up up before crashing through it and over the falls down out the other side.
It was very small and strong but by golly it was going up so I aimed for where I thought it would be and swung in for another shot. Similar experience, but I got more of a turn in it this time. After a bit more of this I turned a little more downwind before cranking around (each time I faced upwind my climb rate had dropped dramatically, making me think that the core was in the other direction) and this worked better and I was soon whanging around in a roller-coaster thermal of 2-6m/s. A respectable climb-rate, but boy was it punchy!!
I was quickly climbing while I continued to try and get the core and on one slightly wider swing felt like a giant hand had grabbed the harness and yanked me upward! The vario was screaming what sounded like octaves above where it usually beeps so I think it shared the feeling... Now this was the real core but I found it nearly impossible to stay in - as I left the 5-6m/s outer part of the thermal and hit the +8m/s core I'd get flung upwards and lose most of the pressure on the brake and a good bit of the pressure on the lines- I was weightshifting way over to the left and burying the left brake near the point of spin but it was the thermal that was deciding where the wing went, not me - and the core was so narrow. Once the initial surge had reduced I had more control, but by then we were exiting on the other side.

Exhilarating flying!!! "Never give up!" is the moral of most low saves, I think, and this one was no exception.
I find it scary when I hit strong air like that close to the ground, but once I'm high up I like it - I can really concentrate on trying to make the most of it because if something does go wrong I've got plenty of altitude to sort it out and get back in the game.

So that was the most exciting part of the flight, a super strong thermal from a super low save!!
I think I dropped out the bottom of it, because all of a sudden it was weak again, and although I searched around I didn't find anything like it again and other thermals had taken me higher. By now the sky was all blue, however even when I was climbing towards short-lived clouds I'd never gotten close to them. Ahh well, musta been some sorta shear layer maybe that I didn't figure out...?

My heart-rate slowly returned to normal as I bobbled along over some hills in a nice line towards the Hume Highway.

I was getting low again as I flew over it, headed for a likely looking hill where I found a couple of Wedge-tailed eagles hunting for dinner and found a light, drifty, scratchy sort of climb that petered out after 200m - the last of the lift I found for the day. I landed soon afterwards...

...and was happy to see that I'd flown 31km from The Pines (40km with a couple of waypoints) over the course of 3:15hrs, mostly fairly low in challenging conditions.

Stable at Mystic

Well, stability is my excuse anyway! I launched twice (at 1300 and 1830), the first time bombing out after a desperate 10min struggle, the second flight wasn't as desperate, but not much more successful as I dribbled down the ridge towards the landing paddock - taking one weak bubble off Emily up for a little altitude before succumbing to gravity.

I did feel a bit better (after the first flight) when within 15min of my first landing all the other pilots that took off around that time landed, including three hang-gliders and an ATOS. One paraglider (that I know of) got away, launching 40-50 min before the rest of us, and Ollie also got away on his hang-glider. He scratched below launch for around 40min, aparently, before crossing low to Little Mystic where he eventually got up, headed over to the Kiewa, flew in to Mt Bogong, and then back. But that's Ollie.

Soaring at Mt Oates

It was a very rare day today - the evening wind was nearly straight on the hill at home. Nath had dropped in after work so we headed up and, after some waiting around for it to die down to launchable speeds, we launched. No problems with the windspeed once in the air (I think the launch is in some sort of compression zone) and we didn't lose height flying out to the (narrow) lift band. Only got 70m above takeoff, but by the time you're that far out the front of the hill you feel a lot higher...
...because the ground is much lower. We watched the sun go down...

...from our comfy armchairs high above the ground...

...and then glided down for dinner. Nice, very nice...

Working Bee at SavHill

A bunch of pilots arrived at Gundowring to clean up the take-off on SavHill and I flew down to the car after we finished. The day steadily developed (there were great cycles coming up the face while we were chainsawing, and whipper-snippering) until by the time we finished small showers were dropping from the clouds that blew overhead. Out over Albury/Wodonga it was much less developed, over the other side of the Kiewa puffy cu's were forming and growing so that they started dropping rain as they passed over us and the sky out towards Corryong and Mt Beauty was dark and stormy looking.

I launched between sprinkles and flew straight even though there was plenty of lift around the hill - I was focused on getting down to the car before the next shower came through. After I landed though, I regretted leaving the lift. If I'd used it to get up closer to the clouds and pushed out over the valley I would have been flying towards less development and it could have been quite a good fly, I think. Ah well, you live and learn.

Gravity doesnt alway win in the end, sometimes it wins in the beginning...

I don't really want to dwell too much on today so this'll be a pretty quick report.

Flight #1:
Got a lift up the hill with a bunch of other pilots, set up and ready to launch by 1315, took off in what felt like a good cycle, scratched, scratched, and scratched before heading for the landing paddock. Plenty of sink around, so I sunk, realised that I wouldn't make it to the landing paddock and made my first landing in Ponty's bombout paddock.

Flight #2:
Pretty similiar to the first flight, except that now I was much more desperate to fly so I kept pushing along Marcus for longer, hoping for something, anything, before heading for the landing paddock. The sink was sinkier, so I sank sankier - but then felt the breath of non-sink! I was already too low to make it to the landing paddock without some sort of climb so I looked for it and did not find it so set up to land on Mystic Lane. There were a few nasty moments as I got down to tree-top height and saw a dust-devil just ahead and off to the left, but fortunately got down before it came through. It's important when landing on Mystic Lane to set up well back because it slopes downhill and if you come in too high too far forward you'll end up in gum trees. I touched down at the first dirt intersection on the track, which was still quite a ways further than I was aiming for.

Flight #3:
The idea was to wait around for some thereputic glass-off ridge-soaring in the evening, so I waited around and launched just after 1800hrs. Unfortunately there wasn't much lift and it wasn't very thereputic, rather a ever-lower series of beats along Emily hoping for some lift. No lift, but at least I made it to the landing paddock this time.

... and some days you're a rock

Nath and I arrived in Bright full of big plans for today - the forecast was great, the sky looked great, we launched into a thermal that straight away took us to 1,600m...

We decided to head down to Harrietville and back and then see how far we could push out towards or past Mt Buffalo. So off we headed for Goldmine...


...got over there ok, looked around for a climb, nothing there hmmm, keep on going I guess, on to the next good point but half way there I was in lots of sink realised if I didn't get a climb I'd be landing on the other side of the hill to the landing paddock (and my car) and stupidly turned around. Now I was low, in sink, and flying upwind towards the lee side of a hill - not the smartest flightplan.... Of course there wasn't any thermals around there, just some rough air, but I got around the hill onto the sunny face that the wind was on but by now I was very low and a long ways from the landing paddock. I scratched around but didn't find anything, although from the movement of the air I'm sure there was a climb around there somewhere. Grrrr.... I ended up landing in a small paddock a few km's from the car. Packed up and hiked back to it to go and pick up Nath, who was still in the midst of a heroic super-scratch that drifted him way up the valley but unfortunately not way up high. He kept in the air for another 40min though, which wouldn't have been easy at all.

After a lot of chatting in the LP, and some food, we went back up the hill that evening for a ridge-soar. Once in the air it wasn't that hard to stay up, and there were bubbles of lift blowing through as well.
If you turned very tight and drifted lots you could stay with them for a bit - one took me up to 1,300m, which felt very high after skimming along the ridge above the trees. A sailplane nosed around the hill underneath me...

...looking for the final climb of the day but he was too late - I was just leaving it! Besides, it would have been far too narrow for him so he headed off around the hills back to Porepunkah. The lift died and the wind picked up so it was time to land - but the car was still up at launch. Out in front of the take-off there was a narrow but strong lift-band, but after going out the front and spiraling down to below launch I was able to fly through it, aiming to crash into the hill below take-off but using it to lift me as I got close so that instead I landed on the new astroturf. Top-landing at Mystic is often not possible, but it's nice when you get it right. Not the epic day we had planned, but the airtime was still good - especially the evening fly.

Rockstar in my own lunchbox!

Today was a GREAT day of flying!!! Not the conditions - they weren't super special in strength, height, or anything, but I chose the right place to fly in and went much longer and further than I have ever been in moderate conditions like this before!!

The forecast was for light-mod SE winds - a good forecast for heading towards Myrtleford - or something more ambitious maybe... I've noticed that on days like this the good lift seems to dry up a lot when closer to Myrtleford (limiting flying distance and time) although there's usually still great looking clouds all along hills in the Kiewa Valley long after it's over near Bright. Hmmm...

13:25 - I'm finally in the air. Getting some necessary jobs finished before leaving for flying, meeting people I haven't seen for months at the LP and on a packed launch all delay that great moment when you separate from the ground, and leave everything behind except the rush of flying, the beep-beep of the vario, and the challenge of trying to solve the puzzle of sun, wind, hill and cloud to find the next thermal before the ground comes up to say, "Game over bucko."


13:38 - A nice 1.7m/s climb takes me to 1,960m. There is a slight drift to the NW and I have to keep going to the SE to find the stronger edge of the thermal. Going by radio chatter there is a mass of pilots around Little Buffalo, some around Blackfellas, and another bunch heading off from Clearspot. Below me another gaggles is circling up before they attempt the crossing to Clearspot. As I reach the top of the lift I turn and fly in the other direction.


14:03 - I'm questioning the wisdom of my flightplan now - my glide suffers when pushing upwind. It was a short crossing to Goldmine, but working on the strategy of doing my scratching up high I swerved in some zero sink half way over but there was nothing there (or I turned the wrong way). Approaching the ridge I again stopped to scratch when it felt like there might be lift nearby and slowly spiraled up to 2,100m. I continued upwind along Reliance Ridge to where I am now, down to 250m above the ridge line and scratching in zeros over a trigger point, hoping a thermal will release under me rather than a sink cycle flush me down to the ground.

14:20 - Woohoo! Back in the game! It was a good trigger point and the thermal that I caught there deposited me at 2,200m, easily enough for the crossing to Pyramid, especially since flying down the rigdeline meant that I now have a cross-tailwind for the crossing! I feel a bit clever about that! I'm at 1,600m now, just flying into the peak of Pyramid Hill after a good glide across, and I've got plenty of height to find the next climb - going by the previous climbs the Tawonga Gap crossing should be easy!!


14:40 - I'm right in the middle of the Tawonga Gap 'tiger country' but it's ok - I'm in a thermal on my way back up. The climb above Pyramid topped out at 2,330m and since I hadn't encountered really strong sink I decided to take a more direct line across the gap - heading straight for the observation platform on the Tawonga-Bright road. It payed off - I cut the corner of the crossing and got this climb half way over. Yeehah!


15:10 - 1,800m and I think this is as high as I'm going to get here. I've been scratching for the last 10min in a really good looking bowl, looking for a climb that will give me enough height to cross over to the other side of the valley - which has been the goal for today - to cross to the NW side of the Kiewa Valley and follow it as far as possible. Over where I am it just doesn't feel like the thermals are pumping. I've made up my mind: even though I'm a lot lower than I'd like to be I'm going to go for the crossing - hopefully I can get a climb off the low spur below Mt York.


15:30 - I made it! It was a long crossing and I was below 1,000m by the time I was approaching the hill I was aiming for - but sure enough there was a climb there! It's slowing down now, as I thermal up past the 1,600m mark, but a couple of hundred meters more and I should have enough height to cross around to the front of Mt York.


16:40 - I'm up and established on the west side of the Kiewa Valley and it's just great! For the last hour I've bobbed along between 1,500m and 2,100m, steadily flying down the range. I'm just opposite the junction with Happy Valley now, and I think the valley wind from there is responsible for the light lifty air over the hills on this side of the valley.

16:50 - I passed through that really nice patch of lifty air and hit a stretch of sink that has me down to 1,300m. There's some light lift around here, and I'm scratching around trying to center it and get back up. If it doesn't work out so well I'll try over to the North some - I can see an eagle flying around there about a km away but another is circling up beneath me so hopefully I can catch that climb.


17:05 -Ark! Here they come again! The last 15min haven't been fun - the eagles must be a younger pair (I'm told wedge-tailed eagles mate and stake out a territory for lift - a young pair tend to be much more aggressive towards anything in 'their' patch - older birds are more secure and forgiving) and they object to my passing through. I've been trying to dodge their attacks without loosing much height while looking for and circling in any lift I find but I'm not doing it all so well - one of the eagles bounced off the wing just then and I'm down to 800m. I'm very close to Bob's hill and seriously thinking about top landing on it.


17:30 Woohoo - still in the game!! As I came in very low to Bob's takeoff I stopped to circle in some lift in the bowl just behind the hill. It drifted over the takeoff and then lifted off in a beautiful little 1.5m/s thermal that took me back up to 1,500m behind the hill...

- and the eagles seemed content to let me go. A couple of hundred meters along the ridge I found another little climb that deposited me nearly at 1,700m. Nice, smooth climbs in gentle evening air - great views down the row of hills to the Hume Weir...

- the rough and tumble of the mid-day thermals left far behind - the lengthening shadows and golden light of the late afternoon - all this and much more combine to produce a golden glow of happy-flight feelings that I savor as I circle in the weakening lift, trying to decide on where I'll head from here. I might continue down the hills, but it's a long way from good roads and it's getting late - from here I could cross the river and make it to the Kiewa Valley Highway on the other side of the valley - which should make for a much quicker retrieve...


17:40 - I decided on the easy retrieve option and have been gliding across the valley for a while now. I don't expect another climb - the sink has been light but constant and there have been no signs of lift - I think the light wind is blowing any residual heat over to the hills maybe? I'm down to 500m and enjoying the smooth air I'm in...


...and the texture of the land I'm flying over.






17:44 - On the ground. As I got low I started wriggling and kicking my legs to wake them up - I haven't used them for hours and don't want them to collapse when I land on 'em! I followed the road for the last little bit before turning around for a nice landing in a paddock just next to the highway. Woohooo!!!!! What a great flight!!! Mystic to Gundowring - I first planned the flight last year, and have had it in the back of my mind ever since.... it's such a great feeling to have finally completed it!! It took me 4:20 hrs to cover what ended up as 65.2km - pretty slow as a means of getting anywhere - but as a way of getting anywere - nothing compares!!!

Now to get back...

Bombing at the Burrs

Very busy at the Mystic launch today...


...a lot of Skyhigh pilots were up from Melbourne for the annual Skyhigh Cup, a novice-pilot-friendly event that was blessed with some good weather.
The forecast indicated that it might be a good day to try and push out past Mt Buffalo early, so once in the air I headed in that direction.
Launching was somewhat of a drama today, about the time I got a place on launch the cycles stopped coming up the face and for the next 25min we waited while light wind trickled across launch from due west... and due east... and a couple of times over the back from the south. Grrr.... The dust from a vehicle driving up to launch provided a clue as to what was happening - thermals were lifting off the marcus spurline alright, but well down the spur, not up close to launch like normal. Next tiny puff from the right sort of direction and I was off - not a great launch - and just kept flying down the ridge. Sure enough, well past the point where we usually climb out I found a 2m/s climb, and was soon happily beeping my way up towards the clouds and watching all the wings below me that had launched once they saw someone going up.

It was nice being in the air with plenty of other wings...
... and the flying wasn't hard initially.

Heading into Little Buffalo it got harder though - I couldn't find a climb and ended up heading down to land at the Burrs. However, I got a great low save and slowly climbed my way up out and away, only to loose all that hight trying to push on to the next ridge line. I got there, but with scant height to spend looking for the next climb and as all-too-soon faced with the option of flying back down to land in the Burrs or continuing into the next valley (small, no landing options at all, no roads). There MUST have been air going up somewhere in the next valley, but I wasn't going to bet my wing, a long walk out, and a tree landing on finding it...
So I headed back to the Burrs and didn't get another low save. Rod very kindly drove me back to pick up my car.


As Will Gadd says, "Some days you're a rock star, some days you're just a rock."

nice flying

A nice long flight today - my longest yet, in fact (duration, that is).
Nothing spectacular distance or height or scenery wise, but it had it's moments. I went to Clearspot, Mystic, Clearspot, half-way to Blackfellas, Clearspot, Little Buffalo, Clearspot, Mystic, Goldmine, down Reliance Ridge, Mt Ebaneazer, back to Goldmine, Pyramid, over the landing paddock and top-landed at Mystic.
Some of the memorable moments were:

-Nearly bombing out on Little Buffalo - I had plenty of height when I arrived, but there was a headwind there and I couldn't find any lift. In fact, I was in 2-4m/s of sink as I dropped down the side of the hill, really hoping I could stretch my glide to land at the Porepunkah airfield, and got a low save off the orchards in that little valley there.

-My second ever frontal collapse on this wing (I think) - I find the AspenII to be very collapse resistant, but when it does go it's usually quite soft and this was no exception. The wing dropped back evenly, we both dropped down evenly, and it snapped back evenly. No drama, just an indication that there were some sharp little pockets of air around.

-Late in the day, drifting into a slow-climb-thermalling daze near Mt Ebaneazer - it was so pleasant up above 2,000m, wide smooth lift.... slowly turning towards the sun, away from the sun, towards the sun, away from the sun... lying back in the harness watching the wing, flying by the relaxing beep, beep, beep of the vario...
After some time the wing snapped on one side a little and I suddenly I realised I didn't know how long it had been since I'd last checked my position (I don't think I had my eyes closed - but the vario noise was pretty hypnotic!) and I might have drifted deep over some inhospitable back valley and sat up in a mild panic - but it was all ok, I was still over the same hill, still not quite at cloudbase, the late afternoon sun was making all the shadows in the valley grow longer and longer and it was probably time to start heading back to the landing paddock.

I diverted to Pyramid on the way and the air was so nice that despite a slight headwind and no climb on Little Mystic I made it back to the launch and toplanded - a perfect end to 4.8hrs in the air!!

New site, new camera!!

There's a new flying site opening up in the area - BobS has purchased the site of the 1998(?) HG World Championships out near Gundowring. It's an afternoon site, and should take a NW-SW, which fills a large gap as none of the other local sites will take W-NW.
I've been out there several times now - flown off it on two different days - and am looking forward to exploring the potential of this new area!

Also, I have a new camera!! My faithful Kodak DX7590 has taken over 16,000 pics, has dust on the sensor, and I've noticed a degradation in picture clarity in recent months. The strengths of the Kodak were it's GREAT lens and ideal size for operating with one hand while flying - it's weakness was the overly aggressive jpeg compression. It's been taking more and more work to clean up the pics and I finally found what looks to be a good replacement. Enter the Ricoh GX200, which sounds like it's special features may work out perfectly for paragliding pics. The main selling points for me were the wide-angle lens (24mm equivalent), ability to take RAW images (speeding up in this area is the significant difference between the GX200 and the GX100), faster frame-rate for video's (30fps should be better than the DX7590's 12 fps), and higher resolution (the GX200 has a 12MP sensor, but as it's still quite small I'm expecting lots of noise in anything but good lighting - which I'll be in most of the time :).
I've ordered with it a remote shutter switch and lens hood (will put a UV, polaroid, or maybe sky filter on this - which should also keep dust from getting blown into it's guts), so there should be lots of fun experimenting. Although this is a pocket-sized camera it has more functionality/programability than some DSLR's so it'll be interesting to see how easy it is to use.
UPDATE: I've picked it up from the shop - looks nice - and the guy I ordered it from swung some sort of deal with his suppliers and got (no price increase) the external viewfinder model (I wasn't going to order that, $120 more expensive for a feature I don't think I'll use much) and a 19mm equivalent wide-angle lens!! Now that's why you buy from the small local businesses - you just don't get that quality of service from the big places or when buying over the net. Thanks Wodonga Photographics, I'll be back for more gear in the future, no doubt.

While I'm talking about new things, I downloaded a freebee photo-stitching program (called autostitch) which I'm really happy with - it's small, fast and easy to use but has lost of controllability, and does a great job. Here's a panorama that it stitched together from six or seven pics I took while flying above Gundowring.

There's a bigger version in my web album here.

Weird air

Flew from Mystic today and at the end of the day I felt like I understand the weather less, thermals didn't make as much sense as they used to, my wing doesn't have nearly as good a performance as I thought, I didn't really mind being on the ground, and what were the weather forecasters on???
Contributing factors may have been some stability and an approaching front? But anyway, I flew from Mystic, to Clearspot, then Blackfellas, Mt Porepunkah (scratched around there for ages before getting over the top, and once there, no boomer to zap me up to cloudbase), and down the spur-line to the north to land in Running Creek Valley.
What made things difficult was firstly the winds, which I'd have to say were strong and variable - three separate times I was pretty much parked in the wind - which was blowing in three different directions, and everywhere I went the wind was blowing somewhere different. Secondly the thermals were very hard to find - it seemed like you had to be right on top of them when they came through or you'd miss 'em, and they didn't last for very long either. Drop out the side or the back and by the time you'd found it again most of it might have passed through.
Coming down the spur on the other side of Mt Porepunkah the whole area was in the sun but do you think I could find a climb? Nup, there were little bubbles rocketing off here and there, drifting strongly in the wind, but no good climbs and the air was getting rougher and rougher so in the end I got fed up as I ran out of height and landed in the valley.
An hours walking and lifts from a farmer, a retired geological surveyer, and then a regional climate change planner saw me back at the landing paddock and my vehicle but check out this amazing B&B place I came across on the way out!!

Over the Tawonga Gap

Short flight today, but satisfying.
I got to Bright late and arrived on launch to find a really light drift from over the back. After monitoring conditions for a bit I launched in a light puff up the face and got a climb from a bit further down Marcus than usual. It did feel a bit lee-sidey at first, but after going up through a bit of a rough layer 400m up it was a smooth elevator to 2,000m. The drift was from the SW and by the time I had maxed the climb I had drifted a fair ways to the NE, enabling a straight glide to Little Pyramid. I was in a bit of a hurry, because while climbing all of mystic had shaded out and I wanted to get a climb off Pyramid before the fast approaching shade shut it out too.
The shade was just marching up the slope as I flew in to it, and I was expecting that to trigger off residual heat from the slope but if it did I didn't find it. Instead I ended up scratching around the high points, ecking out little height gains here, loosing them there, hoarding all the altitude I could as I waited for the sun and a thermal up into the blue again.
Several minutes later an orange and white UP glider wandered around the corner to join me - Chappo was in the same situation. We gradually scratched lower but then the sun came out again and we started scratching higher - the light lift was drifting fast over tiger country and it was tricky knowing weather to stay with the lift in the hope it strengthened or keep close to safe landing options and risk landing. Anyway, I caught a good bubble up several hundred meters (then lost most of it getting back to the trigger point), then Chappo caught one and stuck with it to around 1,800m before heading over to Mt Beauty. I flew right through the area he climbed out of less than 3minutes after him but couldn't find it - however I got my own climb soon enough and although it was a tight, squirmy little thermal, blowing over no-mans land I stuck with it and rode it up to just over 2 km's. Heading downwind it was an easy crossing, not much sink for the first half, but heaps once over the other side, and I didn't find another climb until I was setting up to land near the Mt Beauty Bakery. By then I was wanting to land in time to hitch a ride back to Bright and had to fly away from the core (big, wide, thermal) and spiral down through the lifty air all around!

Indescribable

Sometimes - very, very rarely - everything just comes together in a way that you hadn't even dreamed it would - ever had that happen?
Well it happened to me today and here's how it went down.
Short version (much more to come) I flew to Mt Feathertop (again!),
...climbed up to over 3,000m, and from there flew across to land at the Hotham ski resort.

I took photos, and a short panorama from above Mt Feathertop...
...but I really doubt that I'll ever be able to communicate the wonder of that flight....
Spectacular... scary.... awesome... incredible....

Does it get better than this?

Haven't got time for a long post here, but just wanted to say that TODAY I FLEW OVER MT FEATHERTOP!!!!!!
I've been eye-ing this flight off for over a year now, and to finally do was just indescribable!
It wasn't easy - I got a climb from my first foray onto Bungalow Spur, but couldn't find one when I pushed in further and had to fly back out through some very unwelcome sink. The trees were looking awefully ominous for a minute there, but then I got out of the sink and soon after found another climb and this time it all went smoothly. Got high, transition in further, got another climb, and flew in to Feathertop!
For a few short minutes there I was filled with an incredible sense of possession - I'd beaten the mountain, that sucker was MINE! Yeah!!!!
Awesome views, pics here , will post more later.

another milestone

Two flights today, the first one I launched around 1:30 (Daylight Saving time - 1 hr forward) and climbed to 1,400, then crossed towards Clearspot. I arrived well below the height of the hill and had to scratch around the side before getting up to 1,500 in a narrow, drifting core. Above 1,300 it was easy to stay up, and I boated around taking some pics while watching Ollie climbing up and waiting for Rob to come across. We headed out towards Blackfellas, but Rob didn't like the look of it and turned around for another climb while watching me get lower and lower as I searched for lift. He stayed high and further back, which was a smart move as after desperately working tiny bubbles and even ridge soaring I ran out of height and options and landed on the outskirts of Bright.
I eventually got a lift from Alex, who very kindly drove me up to my car on launch, but once there the conditions on launch (N-NNW at 5kts, gusts to 8kts) proved too tempting and I relaunched. By now (4:30ish) there were small rough-edged bubbles coming through but not many thermals. I did catch a few, but they were extremely narrow and hard to stay centered in. Max height was about 1,200m. FredG and MichelleB drove up and launched after a while (on a Boom5 and UP very high aspect ratio wing) and we flew around for a bit before they landed. I kept flying for until I ran out of bubbles and then landed very pleased with a smooth toplanding in 4-9kts of NNW wind. I wasn't sure it'd work out and was prepared to forget the idea but it all went very well.

Today's flying also puts me over the 200hrs mark - Hooray!!
I arrived home to find that my advanced rating had arrived in the mail - nice timing!

It is ON at Bright!

I took off from the Mystic launch around 12:30 today - 

- just after BrianW - and we both got a nice climb that went close to cloudbase (just light whispies over Mystic at that stage) around 2,100m. I headed over to Goldmine (nice looking cloud there) and as I left saw Brian, KarlT, FredG and CraigC thermalling over towards Wandi. After a brief search I connected with a climb (triggering off the GM point, 3m/s) and while climbing towards the cumulous above saw the others had decided to head directly to Mt Ebaneazer. By the time I'd reached CB (2,400m here!) I'd lost sight of Brian, Fred and Craig but could see Karl heading towards the Reliance ridge (looked like he got some pretty strong sink). 

I had heaps of height and there were really solid looking clouds along the ridge...

...so I headed straight towards Ebaneazer also. 

The flying was really nice! I remember some pretty funky air from last spring but so far I haven't felt anything like that this year. Today, for instance, there were a couple of times I jumped off the bar smartly, and once the wing flexed with a bit of a snap (might have been a frontal collapse if I didn't stop it), but all in all I've found things quite benign. I'm usually comfortable enough to take photos with both hands off the brakes (using the bar for pitch control) and I'm wondering how much of this is due to the wing I'm flying, how much due to flying at the top of the weight range, and how much due to the conditions. For sure the wing helps a lot - since I've gotten used to it (Gradient Aspen II) I've had far fewer collapses than I did on a DHV 1-2 and flown in much rougher conditions (around the end of last summer). I think because it gives you so much more information about the air around you it is easier to anticipate (and check) most collapses well before they occur. 

Anyway, as I got closer to Ebaneazer another glider was also gliding in

- and it was Rob. He was flying a Avax RSF and I was interested to see that the Aspen had a comparible glide and slightly higher trim speed - although I'm sure he could leave me in the dust once he used his speedbar.

We arrived at around 2,100m to find widespread lift in the area so we just kept on going (partly due to a combination of the cloud above us getting darker and shade approaching the spurs above Harrietville we were aiming for). As we crossed over Harrietville I could see someone (turned out to be Brian) scratching on the spur south of Harrietville and as we flew further and further in (chasing the sunlight) spotted a couple of wings well above us and much closer to Feathertop.

Rob was ahead of me and hit some sink going in to the ridge  - he nosed around but didn't find anything and turned around for the glide back out to Harrietville. I took a slightly different path in and as I crossed over the spur felt the wing pull forwards ever-so-slightly into.... YES! LIFT!! But then I dropped out the other side. It was felt very small and very light and wasn't in the same place twice as I bumbled around trying to stay in it. It felt like it was being drawn deeper towards Hotham but when I ventured a bit that way I lost it completly. I turned back but what was there was there no more and after a few searching turns I was getting uncomfortably low a long way from the nearest landing site so left the spur and headed for Harrietville. Everything except the upper ridges was shaded over by now, 

... and the air was quiet and dead as I glided down (not even a beep) to land next to Rob in the Harrietville quarry. Brian had landed somewhere nearby and Karl up the road a bit.

In retrospect (that wonderful thing), I think I should have waited in the lift over Ebaneazer until there was sun on the Feathertop spurs before crossing - there was heaps of lift there and if I'd flown back to near the edge of the cloud I think I could have easily maintained height there and waited for a better time to cross. OR, topped up near to cloudbase and taken a more direct route across - I would have been even further from sunny ridges but there was a darker line of cloud stretching towards Feathertop (convergence?) and I might have gotten a really good glide all the way there at cloudbase. 

Things to remember for next time...

Fred and Craig made it to above Mt Feathertop, and we heard on the radio one of them reaching 3,100m by flying up the side of one of the clouds. From here they flew along the Razorback ridge to Hotham (as they flew in, Ollie was flying out on his hang-glider - apparently he took a really good line and made it back to the Mystic LP on the one glide from Hotham...), got a weak climb there and made it back out (encountering hail on the way), to the smoko bowl (Fred got a 6.5m/s average climb there), and glided down to the Mystic LP as the now blue-black clouds near Harrietville dropped a bunch of rain. Awesome flying, and some nice timing there too.... 

Fred had a video camera with him - hopefully he posts some of the footage of the flight!

Above the snow!!!

Sometimes, when you fly, it's like you somehow sidestep all the rules and slip into a place not made for people - a wonderful place, breath-takingly beautiful, sometimes scary, a place run on laws you can't see and only dimly sense. No visit is the same, nor lasts long enough - for we are but foreigners in this wondrous place - but once you have been there the memory sinks deep and is never fully forgotten. At every chance you will strive to get back, and, if you do get back, strive to stay a little longer, to learn a little more, see a little further. Each visit fills, to the exclusion of all else, the moments that measure it's duration and overflows into a deep satisfaction that lights all else for a time afterwards. But only for a time... until the vividness of that memory is burned through by everyday living and you wonder did it really happen? Did I do that? Surely such sights are not for men but for eagles and angels and the winds and the stars. But the memory is still there, however deep, and when the chance comes once again - to slip by the rules and re-enter that wonderful place - you leap for it with anticipation.

So yeah, you could say it was a pretty good day's flying yesterday. A lot of the boxes that go into making a 'great' flight were ticked for me - flying with friends, a good recovery from a bad place, flying difficult air and flying it well, taking off early and landing late, trying new things, wonderful views... Something I've wanted to do for a long time now is fly above the snow, and as I was thermalling above the ridge near Mt Ebeneazer I looked down and there it was - snow all under and through the trees along the shadowed side of the ridge! I've flown to Harrietville a number of times and several times to Harrietville and then onto somewhere else but never (until yesterday) there and back again. It was a good decision to turn back to launch when it looked like I wouldn't make the crossing to Goldmine - despite the others all being ahead. It was good to get a bit more of a feel for the air before heading over - and then heading over in good air. It felt great to find a climb where I thought there should be one - and then to stick with it through the light inversions and to pick it up again after the wind shear layer nearly to cloudbase. It was good to stay over the high ground - and to set the goal of flying back to Bright. It was great to just clear the last ridge and glide slowly to the landing paddock as the few clouds in the sky faded and the thermic part of the day ended.
Yep, the whole day was pretty good!!

The stats:
flight time: 2hrs 15min
max height: 1,912m
peak vario: 6m/s, steady around 1.8m/s (thermals were not small, but very unorganised air and difficult to 'core'. There seemed to be several light inversion and there was a wind sheer layer around 1,600m)

Snowtime!

The weather yesterday looked agonizingly beautiful - easily the best flying day for the last 2 months - and I knew there was no way I was going to be able to get out of work. A front was approaching and there was more rain, snow and thunderstorms forecast for the weekend. However, the front wasn't forecast to come through until shortly after 10am so I was keeping a close eye on it's speed - desperately hoping it would delay enough for some pre-frontal flying at Mystic.

The morning dawned bright and clear, come twelve noon and I was at Bright. No one else was around. A fair number of the local pilots are currently overseas, but I was expecting at least someone else. There were cycles coming through so after a quick safety call (going flying from Mystic, I'll call you when I'm down, don't send out the search & rescue unless you haven't heard from me by 4pm), setup, and I was off!!

The wind was from the North, 12-20km/hr, it was still sunny (although high cloud was moving in), and the air felt GOOD!! Nothing more than some light ridge lift to the right of launch so I swung over towards Marcus and, sure enough, found a climb there. It was narrow, rough, and had pretty sharp edges, and the wind was blowing it all over the place - but it was going up fast and I was sticking to it! I lost it around 1,200m, I think there was a wind shear layer around there but it could have just been that I lost it.

I nosed around, then pushed forwards along marcus (didn't find anything) but coming back connected with another (or the same) climb from Marcus. This one was going up faster - I was averaging 2.5 m/s, despite constantly falling out the sides, and peaking around 5m/s. Again I lost it around 1,200, but I thought I had fallen out the front of it.

The next thermal I caught I lost twice, and each time searched downwind (with the wind I had a pretty quick downwind speed) and caught it again - all the way to where the cloud started to form below and around me at 1,500m. Yee-har!!!


The rough conditions were keeping me on my toes and I'm happy to report that I didn't get a single collapse (funny, but I get a lot less collapses on the DHV2 than I when I was flying a DHV1-2).
I'd drifted a fair ways from launch by now, and the clouds looked good over goldmine, so I kept going downwind, curving around to intersect the goldmine ridge.


Although there was no lift over goldmine I could feel that there was a climb somewhere close by, so went searching downwind and found a strong core that was so small I couldn't stay in it for a full circle. I flew through it a bunch of times before finally getting a few turns in it but then lost it. I'd regained a couple of hundred meters though, and was pretty close to cloudbase.

What's more, there was an awesome looking cloud several km's down the ridgeline...

...so I went on glide.

The first couple of km's were good, but then the glide got worse and worse and the trees got closer and closer. I was flying in the shade of a great dark looking, flat-bottomed cloud but was just not connecting with any lift. Eventually I had to decide if I wanted to fly out into the valley and land or start kicking treetops so I left the ridgeline (I wonder now if the climb was triggering from the next ridgeline upwind and was blown back to where I could see it...) and flew out into the valley. Lots of sink near the ridge, better in the valley and I took some pics of the snow before landing.

A pity I didn't connect with that next climb, it would have made Harrietville a piece of cake to reach... ahh, well, next time.... But how cool is it to get good xc-able conditions like this in winter?!! I'll be watching the weather more closely in future ;-D

Mt Feathertop with a nice covering.