Some car troubles meant I didn't arrive in Bright until nearly 1pm. By then Bob was already in the air, but Dallas would meet me at the landing paddock and give me a lift up to launch. A fun surprise was meeting Veronica also at the landing paddock - I'd been following her Canadian flying blog for some time. We set up on launch ...
...and as soon as I saw enough movement in the trees left of launch I was away. Veronica launched soon after, but quickly out-climbed me.
I concentrated on my thermalling and, next time I looked around, she was half way to Goldmine. Once I had a comfortable amount of height I headed off too, and half way over spotted Bob circling fairly low above the valley NW of Pyramid.
I angled a bit towards him, but stopped for a nice climb above the ridgeline. He was climbing also, and our respective cores drifted closer together as we got higher. I left mine at 2,400m and arrived at his in time for a few "woohoo's" as we circled together before we glided off to Pyramid. Meanwhile, Veronica had hooked into a climb further down the ridge (closer to Harrietville) and had crossed Freeburg...
...towards the back of Pyramid. From where I was it looked like she got awfully deep in tree country to me, (maybe it was just the relative angles we were at) but musta know where she was going because she was soon climbing out over Pyramid. Bob and I had to search a bit for a climb, and while we were climbing Veronica had left for Mt Beauty with what looked like massive height. The crossing is at least 7km of trees however, and it only takes few minutes of heavy sink to change I've-got-heaps-of-height to Aaghh-I-don't-know-if-I'll-make-it! But she looked like she had a pretty good glide going and Bob soon left also (he'd outclimbed me over Pyramid).
I re-connected with the climb and headed off myself (from 2,650m), but I chose a slightly more northerly line than the other two - heading straight towards the Tawonga Gap observation platform. I didn't hit massive sink, and arrived over the ridge at 1,700m. There were little shots of lift blasting around the place, but I couldn't seem to connect with anything solid enough for long enough to gain much height. The wing was jerking left and right and I had to fly really actively to even keep it semi-centered over my head. One particularly hard swing to the side ended with half the wing blowing out and it took 2-3 rotations and a bit of strong pumping on the left side before everything was sorted out again. This new wing collapses much softer than I'm used to - I urgently need to spend more time practicing collapses and getting my correction reflexes faster - even big collapses don't feel as scary while they're happening as they did on the 1-2. I'm not sure if that's a good feature or a bad one really! Anyway I headed up the ridge line towards some likely looking bowls to look for a climb there. Veronica had flown right over the town of Mt Beauty and it looked to me like she got a climb out from the hill out the back of the town before pushing out up the valley. I couldn't see Bob anywhere at this time, but didn't spend much time looking as I was quite close to the trees along the ridge. I scratched along the ridge line, going from 160m above the peak to 100m below it before finding something that firmed up into a decent climb after 20min of desperate scratching. There was a shear layer around 1,800m, and it took a bit to figure out what was happening there but a nice strong bubble of lift got me through that and back up to safety and comfort at 2,290m. While I was climbing I had spotted Bob across the other side of the valley, scratching low on a spur-line. Veronica was pushing through the valley wind to a likely looking ridge a bit behind him. Heading towards Bob, I stopped briefly above the boundary of the bush and farmland to top up to 2,450m before continuing across the valley. Bob was climbing by now,
...which made it very easy as I just flew into where his climb should intersect my glide - and it did! A great climb, this one, it took me all the way up...
...to cloudbase for the first time today - at 3,009m! As I got to base the cloud started to dissipate, but the thermal I was in continued up for another 100m into a hole in the middle of the cloud. Very surreal, banking around in light lift, blue sky above, cloud all around, base 100m lower, and only some faint whispy bits below! It didn't last long however, and as the cloud broke up more...
...I decided it was time to continue up the ridgeline. Meanwhile, Bob had taken some big whacks and decided to head out into the valley. There wasn't much lift there and Dallas motivated him back to the ridgeline and he was soon climbing back up while I headed off along a cloudy line (great glide) towards Mt Tawonga. Veronica had also been thrashed around a bit by the rough stuff down low and opted for the smoother conditions of the valley - unfortunately she didn't find any good lift and eventually landed. Bob and I both had experienced some anxiety during our first attempts at crossing over the back of the ridge towards Eskdale...
...and were grateful to find light lift that we stuck in (despite it drifting us back towards the Kiewa Valley) before heading off again. In retrospect, I should have realised from the amount of drift we were getting that we were heading into a valley wind used the height from that thermal to find another good climb from the ridge, taken that all the way to the top, and then crossed above it. But it was getting on, and I succumbed to impatience and headed across from 2,300m. It was a long crossing into wind, and we headed down a spur to a likely looking bump near the end of it. Here I stayed, gaining a few meters in a bubble that was drifting back up the ridgeline, losing a few more meters when I lost it. Bob was scratching around the same area for a while, but he stayed with a slightly stronger bubble and ventured out into the valley. 
I thought he was on the ground a couple of times, but he found little bit of lift and worked his way up the valley and out of sight. A while later I heard a radio call from him to Dallas as he left a climb - he had got back up to 2,100m (which sounded really high to me, scratching between 600m - 1,100m for the last 30min) and was past Eskdale. I kept going for another 20min - by now I'd been fighting the light lift and valley wind around the same little hill for 50minutes and gradually got lower and lower between each small gain of height until the paddock came up and ended this round of the war with gravity.
Still, I'm stoked with the flight - I've been wanting to cross over the Kiewa Valley ever since my first Tawonga Gap crossing, back in Nov'06. It was great to have other people to fly with, they both helped mark lift & sink and also were a good encouragement to go faster and further. Getting to base was pretty special, and cruising along with stacks of height afterwards - the views in every direction were just amazing. Dallas did some great back country navigating and picked me up a bit later and then we drove around for a while trying to contact Bob. We eventually ran him to earth in the Tallangatta Pub, where we had a bite to eat before setting out on the drive back to Bright. We pulled in to town at 10:50pm, tired & sore, but very happy with the day. How good is paragliding!!!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment