There was a good turn out at Funston yesterday, I went out to test out the changes and fixes to my harness and instrument mount. I wanted to make sure every thing is in order before heading out to the meet in Big Spring, Texas.
Once the testing was done, I got together with Brian. He had heard on the radio that there was going to be a basejumper, going from a Tandem Paraglider. Brian is banked up over the dumps at Pacifica.
While we waited we got some air to air shots.
There were lots of paragliders, out enjoying the smooth bouyant air, also waiting for the jump.
I did get some video footage of the jump. The quality is not great, but I'll try and put something together to post soon.
Paris was out at Westlake teaching Tandem, he stopped by afterwards to say Hi.
His student got about an hour, and some nice pictures and video.
On the days with low ceilings the lift band gets quite wide, the bottom of the cloud is bouyant and you can glide out a long way, I love the light patterns on the ocean. You'll have to click on this and imagin that is all you can see, or come take a tandem with me sometime.
Went quite a bit further out but kind of zoned out and didn't tke any pictures from out there.
Most of the afternoon humpback whales had been sighted, back at launch I was trying to get a shot with a glider and a whale. Almost an impossible task. The Whale is the black sploge in the bottom left.
The golden gate bridge was some times in the fog some times not. Its on the edge here.
In actuality, the ceiling was just as high or higher than prevoius attempts and the hills on the west side were not working at all. So we decided to head over to Goat. Donny went over for the first time while I watched Tom fight a good fight in the valley, almost making it to the big elevator. Once Tom landed I headed over to Goat only to hear thatt Donny was also landing. (I think he had beer suck :) So what to do ? Well I headed back over the pass westward, blundering in to lift the whole way in a headwind. So I through in a few turns and got enough altitude to cut the corner over to Hiway 25 and off I went. Below you can see the valley that the fault has caused.
Going down peach tree valley H25, was pretty easy. I got low in one spot where I raced for a cloud which fell apart before I got to it. But a condor came by and showed me it was about to form up again. I was a little out of the main convergence line, but the lift was still plenty good. 
In fact the lift improved all the way to sunset. Cloudbase lloked to be about 14k, 10 miles to the east. To the west the Marine layor was in control. I got to 11.5k at the end of peach tree valley and pretty much went on glide to Shandon on Hiway 46 near Paso Robles. 
It was a technical flight mostly due to retrieve navigation. But the air was smooth and easy, which was good because after 6 hours I ache anyway. 
The flight was about 70 miles. And crossed some new and interesting terrain :) And of course I couldn't have done it without my excellent retrievel crew especially Terry, Thanks Terry !
