Making the most of the day!!

What a great spot to be at lunch time!! Brett (the far pilot) and I talked about making a run over to the Kiewa Valley if the day looked good enough (xc skies was predicting a light SE and good climbs) and we took off just before 1pm to check it out.
I didn't find anything over Marcus until I got over the second 'bump' where I took a tight little climb up to 1,000m, then searched around for the core - the air was going up everywhere as I flew back towards launch and I knew the core would be worth finding. I found it just over launch and it was good, peaking at 5.5m/s and taking me up over 2,100m. "Woohoo! The day's goanna be epic" I thought, and headed across to Goldmine. Brett was already over there and had gone down the ridge a ways - see him?... ... I didn't find anything as I approached or flew over the ridge but I'd gotten a 13:1 glide over so I kept going towards Pyramid. I arrived over the lower point with plenty of height, but there was no lift there so I turned right and headed in towards the second point, pretty happy to have bypassed two climbs that I usually need to take. I arrived there and still no lift! Weird, I'd thought I'd be getting sucked into screamers over Pyramid if Mystic was giving off 5.5m/s climbs - maybe the climb is further along... Nope! Only more sink...
Now I was low, just over the trees, and in desperate scratching mode - following the ridgeline down and circling in anything that would even keep me up. Lower and lower with nothing to indicate any nearby lift.... I stopped to circle in zero's at the lowest point of the spur (bottom left of the pic above), wondering what had gone wrong with the day and my thermal spotting. There was plenty of sun around, light wind on the hill... so where were the thermals???
Well, one of them was underneath me, it turned out. The zeros slowly became ones, and then the climb steadily improved until I was happily climbing at 2-2.5m/s back up to 2,000m.
I headed in towards the top of Pyramid for a top-off before crossing the Tawonga Gap and straight away was flying in sink. I had a 2:1 glide in to the top of the hill and didn't have much time to play around there as I was still going down. No thermal off the top, sink down to the second point, still no lift... it was all feeling horribly familiar as I got lower and lower. Half way down the ridgeline I finally flew into a light, drifty thermal which averaged 0.9m/s for the next 20min. It was drifting quite a lot too, but that was good because by the time I left it I was already a third of the way over the gap and back around 2,000m. Interestingly, each climb had topped out 100m lower than the one before... I was very keen to avoid any more 2:1 glides... ... Landing on the road below HAS been done before, but it's not the sort of thing you'd wish on anybody - I flew very slow and made the most of the light lift downwind of the thermal until I was safe within an easy glide of the Kiewa Valley landing options.
The glide was good and I arrived over the ridge-line with over 1,700m asl, which steadily reduced no matter what I did. I sank as I flew on the right side of the ridge (the SE wind should be carrying the thermals over to somewhere around here...), I sank as I flew on the left side of the ridge (Huh! Maybe it's triggering earlier, or maybe there's a valley wind that's carrying the lift the other direction?), I sank when I flew over points (why weren't they triggering??), I sank when I flew over saddles. There wasn't even the hint of lift around, and by this time I'd discarded so many theories about what was happening and was totally confused. I arrived at a bowl and was low enough that I had to stay and either climb out or bomb out. My average sink rate slowed and finally there were clues of lift around - short scraps of lift that would lift half the wing and allow me to do half a turn or so before they were gone - but at least I wasn't sinking out any more. I bobbed up and down, exploring the lift and trying to find out where it was coming from (or going to), gaining a couple of hundred metres, before it all disappeared. Bugger.
I didn't have enough height to cross the valley (at least there were some clouds over there), or even make it to the next bowl up the ridge, had no idea what was going on with the air, and needed to go somewhere fast because the sink was increasing again. Just before my radio had gone flat (AAA Alkalines just don't handle the cold as well as Lithium-Ion packs) I'd heard from Brett (ahead of me) that he couldn't figure out what was happening on the hills and was heading into the valley. Oh well, if what you're doing isn't working - do something else!
I flew out over a spur (maybe... maybe...no.), had a bit of a wander up over the tree-line (nope, that's not working either...) and flopped into the valley.
Now a while back I flew from The Pines on a fairly stable day - I just couldn't seem to get over 1,400m for ages and in a burst of unquestioned insanity I bashed upwind for most of the afternoon (away from much higher looking clouds 30km downwind...) but I did learn one very useful thing - when you're low vineyards can be very reliable triggers.
And there were a succession of vineyards sprinkled up the Kiewa valley. Yay! I headed for the nearest one and it worked again! I climbed from 700m back up to 1,500m, then at the next vineyard from 850m to 1,500m, then again from 1,000m to 1,300m - where I headed for the top end of the little side valley on in the right center of the pic below.
You'd think I would have learned by now...I found sink where my paragliding knowledge said there should be lift.... sigh, heading along the ridgline, getting lower and lower, being tempted to head towards the road to save some walking when I landed (which usually results in less walking, but always results in less flying), but there was a gap ahead - if there was no lift here (a good trigger point if the valley wind was all back-to-front) I'd head for the road. But... there was lift!! A tight but welcome climb that lifted me from 700m back to 1,450m!
Here I used my experience to do a smart thing by flying crosswind to a nice point (baking in the sun with the wind presumably blowing up it's face) of the N side of the valley where I could catch a thermal up through the 1,500m valley inversion and finally get some good height and fly along the peaks of the ridgeline.
Except... there was no lift there! And lots of sink! I couldn't believe it! The wind was doing very different things at different levels and I'd thought I'd nearly be able to ridge soar that face until I did get a thermal. Ahh well, back down the same sinky ridge line I'd followed before, back to the same point I'd climbed out of 20min before, hmm, no climb... keep heading down the ridge I guess.... What is with today? Maybe I should just do the opposite of everything that I think of...
A bit further down I found a climb that was so light and delicate that it took every gram of concentration that I had to stay in it meandered slowly along at the mercy of the wind. I was staying with, flying it like a flatlands thermal, and it drifted me back onto the ridgeline I'd attempted to get up on before. It disappeared, re-appeared, disappeared again, and I left, then there it was again for a few turns, then gone again, then gone for good but by then I was at 1,300m (funny, since 1pm every thermal seemed to top out lower than the one before...) and in a really light convergence zone from the wind blowing out of Happy Valley opposite me. And, I was over the northern ridgeline.
Dramatic burntout patches from the Feb '09 fires were sprinkled along the hills and ridge around me, but these were the later, slower burning part of the fire and hadn't caused much damage (burning small trees, bushes, and dead branches on the ground, browning the established trees but not killing them).
From this point (above right of my shoes in the pic below) I got another slow, drifty, sortof climb that got me most of the way across the the bowl behind it -and fed into a genuine thermal - 2.8m/s back up to the spectacular heights of 1,850m!! Woohoo!! A good climb after ages spent grubbing around low always feels fantastic! Being able to finally relax, after the intense concentration required to beat whatever obstacles you have been fighting, is such a release! And the view is much better by then too!! And if it's late in the day and you have been nurturing the suspicion that the day has died for a while, it's just great!!
It was late in the day, but I was over the hills on the right side of the valley finally, with a tailwind behind me and smooth late-afternoon conditions ahead. Yeehar!!!
Lookit the view! Lookit how far I've come!

I cut the corner of the next bowl and gliding along the ridge in smooth air, weightshifting to work every bit if lifty air I could find, and slid over Savhill about 300m over the takeoff. I was hoping for a late climb from here but didn't find one. There was a cloud of dust heading down the new track though, which looked like Michael's truck (Dozer driver who's been making the track for Bob). I gave him a ring on the mobile and, sure enough, it was him! He had just knocking off for the day and soon spotted me as I flew over - we had a quick chat and he told me what the wind was doing at ground level. I didn't find any lift to speak of over the next few bowls but the air was warm and smooth and the late shadows and sunlight made the view spectacular.
All too soon I was doing a final circle to check the wind strength and direction, making sure the camera was secured in it's bag and the flight-deck all zipped up, looking hard to make sure I hadn't missed any powerlines, final approach, crabbing along downwind of a road and powerline, kicking the legs to make sure there's plenty of blood flow and they'll work ok, standing up in the harness, a bit of brakes, watching the ground, brakes up.... flare... and down.
The steady wind in my face is gone, the ground is firm and steady beneath my feet, my wing - which has been moving above my head and telling me what the air is doing for the last four hours - is suddenly still and quite - just a pile of material and string now. Just material and string.
I slowly pack up, savoring the afterglow of the flight, remembering the beauty of the late shadows, feeling the muscle aches from hours in contact with the harness that I never feel while flying, wondering how I'll get back to my car....

I hadn't organised a retrieve and decided to hitch hike until I ran out of daylight and then think about ringing a friend. Hitching back to Bright from here doesn't work very well, I've found, because you either have to take three (or four) lifts if you go via Happy Valley and Ovens, or at least two lifts if you go via Tawonga. The problem is as you run out of daylight less and less cars come past and nobody wan't to pick you up after dark. So I decided to make for Wodonga instead. It was much closer, I could stay the night there and retrieve the car (and maybe fly again) in the morning. Even though I was on a back road I'd only walked a few km's before a nice old guy in a semi stopped for me. Once we had the wing up in the cab (looong way up) we headed off. Tom was on his way back to the farm north of Holbrook after delivering a load of hay to the fire affected farms down in Gippsland. He insisted on dropping me off at the doorstep of where I headed for - no mean feat maneuvering a rig that size through the streets of Wodonga. Thanks Tom, it's people like you that make the world a better place.