The Waiting Game

This was a day that looking at the sky, we should not have been able to stay up.  Morning cloud cover, high cirrus, light winds. Many pilots sunk out, and only a paraglider had any real success at soaring, and even he was eventually flushed.  Keith, Amy, Doug, Pete, Pat, Gary, PK, Bob, Jeff, and myself were all very aware of the meager conditions.

As we waited, I saw a line in the clouds miles away, and a wave of sunlight moving across the ground under it.  I had decided that I was going to wait it out, as I had seen too many pilots sink out already and the conditions couldn't get lighter.  Pete Judge was going to hit a patch of blue when it broke over the valley, but was held up by a tandem HG on launch and launched late in the window.

He took off when the next wave of cirrus was moving back in and sunk out almost immediately. PK launched and also had no success.  Things were looking grim as PK stays up when a butterfly passes wind.  I waited...and waited...and the next wave of blue carrying sunlight arrived. Almost on cue, the winds on launch turned on and the thermals started kicking in.

I launched in the first strong cycle I could get, and climbed off launch.  I followed the lift for maybe 200 yards and immediately turned back to launch where I knew there was more of it.  I saw too many previous pilots, attempt to jump to the high ridge right away, and then end in sled runs.  So I decided to work with what I had first, and see if I could get above the ridge.

I turned and burned with tight figure 8's in front of launch, and made it up to 100 ft below the top of the spine.  Once I reached this altitude and headed along the ridge, I felt I could keep climbing to the higher ground.  If not, I could easily scramble back to the lift if I lost the climb.

I hit the spine and continued to climb; everything was cake from there on out.  Jeff Curtis joined me in the air about 30 minutes later, and we soared the ridge alone till Bob Reynolds joined us as well.  Bob had sunk out earlier, and true to form, drove back up and took another shot at it with Keith B.  Keith still had trouble getting up over the ridge and ended up heading to the LZ early.  Bob managed to fly for a little over an hour till his shoulder said "enough".

The lift band was pretty narrow the whole afternoon/evening and at times it would move out away from the ridge a few hundred yards, and then tuck back in. The valley kept letting off heat from the day and we had some turbulence come in from time to time.  I ventured off to the west ridge and tried to soar the face, but after significant altitude loss, and no major gains, I decided to head back to the main ridge.  I made a couple more attempts at this as the day wore on, but no such luck.

This was a great day to work on maximizing lift and being patient; a little Tai Chi practice creeping into my hang-gliding.  I worked a bit on using best glide between sink and lift to maintain my altitude when things would shut down.  My highest climb was just over 3000' where the lift seemed to top out.  The rest of the afternoon, was complete cloud cover and no sunlight shown it's head anywhere near West Rutland. 

As the evening set in, the air became more textured and there was a considerable amount of turbulence as the valley let off the remaining heat.  This caused the descent to the LZ to be a bit rocky but no severe issues arose.  Jeff followed me out to the LZ after hours of soaring and thermalling.  I set up over the South treeline in Ducky's field, and burned off the excess altitude with figure 8's.  The LZ was calm as can be, and the air felt like glass.



Flight Time: 3 hours and 12 minutes.

Photo courtesy of Pat.  I didn't have my camera this day.