Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Going south from Ed Levin

is not an obvious choice, since the first part is directly into a strong headwind. But I am not going to take credit for the "choice" since I was going to sink out while I was exploring. Cloudbase was pretty low (3200ft) and soon after launching I was running from the clouds with Chris. Here is the Ed Levin County Park Lz. I was under a very lifty cloud so I just tootled along into the 24km/h headwind. With that wind I could easily just glide back whenever I wanted. Or not... Here I am looking at a potential LZ. This is the church on Sierra Rd. Just a few weeks ago EricH took us on a tour of the north and south XC routes. I would never have attempted this flight without doing this. LZ's are few and far between. And Hazards are plenty. I did get back up, a couple of times. There were some flecks of rain here and there that had me nervous, I speed up to get out of the drizzel, which was localized in the convergence marching south down the valley. Interestingly back at Ed Levin the wind turned NE and flushed all the other pilots. Once out of the lift/rain band I was sinking again, I did not have the hieght I wanted to jump the Metcalf Hills. With the sink I was soon scoping out a nice conservative landing. Uphill into wind, short green grass, with butter cups, easy retrieve, very likely my cell phone would work, thats the way I like it. You have to remember every outlanding here is an "emergency" landing. Maybe like having a flat tire in a car, you shouldn't be stopped where you are, but you deal with it in that manner. This beautiful field was incident free.Piece of cake, thanks so much to Chris for coming and getting me, and to MarginalMark for the ride up the Hill. Here is the short 28km flight, I was in the air about 1hr25. Not bad for March.

On a complete tangent the more I see these movies, the more I think I am missing out on something. Check it out.

1 comment:

Brian Foster said...

Yeah, but what have you done lately?