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.