Two recent flights of note

Well, I haven't been here in a while, but I thought I'd log two interesting flights from yesterday.
The first flight was very short, and really didn't go the way I'd envisioned it. You can watch it here (it's not long!)



There's no video for the second flight, and my XC Trainer screwed up the tracklog so even the Leonardo log shows less than half of it, but you can download the google earth kmz of it for GE viewing. Here's a GE screenshot.
















Flight #1
This is the first time I've been under my reserve (I guess I can still say that I haven't deployed my reserve...), if you watch closely you can see the passenger gripping the handle as I pull the wing up (you can also hear the velcro rip loose). He drops it as I turn and we run off the hill. While I remain upright the reserve sits in the container - as soon as I start sitting back in the harness it tips out and deploys.
Due to the steep slope we landed on, some springy pine branches from a felled pine tree, the large light-weight reserve, and our airbag harnesses, we landed a lot gentler than it looks like on the video. No damage to passenger, pilot, or equipment.
It took about 2hrs to get everything back up to launch, walk back down and hunt around until we found the reserve container (very close to where we came down), untangle lines, do a cell-by-cell inspection of the wing, inflate it several times to check for other damage, repack the reserve, and convince another pilot to fly with me.

Flight #2
Wally was the brave volunteer, we launched and climbed out nicely (no noticeable damage to the wing). We left Mystic when the climb slowed down and headed for Goldmine, took a thermal there most of the way to base, then headed off down Reliance Ridge.
It was a long, sinky glide, but right at the end we flew into a thermal and climbed again. Once we'd topped out we headed towards Bungalow Spur (at the base of Mt Feathertop), but it was sinky going and we diverted to a newly forming cloud along the way. This allowed us to arrive over the base of the spur with good height, which we slowly used up as we meandered around in patchy broken lift and sink. Eventually a good climb came through and kicked us up (tight cores, had to really crank in 'em), from there we pushed further up and in, climbing to base before making the glide in over the summit.
It was quite cold up high, and Wally was unfortunately wearing shorts.... so we tried to limit our time up high somewhat....
While climbing we'd noticed a SW wind up high, so we continued North past Mt Feathertop (towards Stoneytop) and then NW down the Freeburg Spur. The clouds were slowly developing and merging over the high plains, but it was a classic looking sky and the clouds were all working.
We climbed again (Westerly wind now, which was unfortunate as it would mean a headwind back to Mystic), and went on glide back towards Reliance. Despite pushing headwind (trimmers mostly off) we got a good glide and turned towards Mystic. We flew through several thermals but didn't bother turning, and once we got close to Goldmine we put big-ears on. We were still going to overshoot the LP, so Wally held the big-ears tabs down until we had just the center 15 or so cells open, and that and some handy sink degraded our glide enough to glide into the LP in time for afternoon tandems.

This is the second time I've flown my Takoo 2 over Mt Feathertop, and the first time I've taken it up the Northern ridge towards Mt Beauty. If you're looking for an awesome tandem wing, get the Takoo 2 - launches well, flies really well, great landing flare.

Here's a pic of the tandem in front of Mt Feathertop, climbing before heading in over the summit. This wasn't from the flight with Wally, but an earlier on. Taken by super-pilot Ollie, who seems to be flying out of Feathertop (or past it coming back from Hotham) nearly every time I've been in there recently!