Sunday, September 13, 2009

The last flight of the trip

I had a very interesting last flight of this trip at Crazy Creek gliderport.

Crazy Creek gliderport is located only 60 miles from San Francisco. It has an unpaved but long runway dedicated to glider operations. It reminded me of King Mountain. There are small hills all around the runway, and it is easy to get the first lift over one of those hills.

But today, we had waves. It didn't look like we had waves in the morning. There was almost no wind. But a few gliders reported that they were in a wave, so I flew up little before 2pm. Around 4,000 ft, I saw a couple of gliders (Ginny's G3 and Matt's 22T) flying back and forth, and they looked like flying in a wave, so I released there. But it turned out that they were just struggling and looking for lift. Without any other choice but to join them, I kept searching any sing of wave or whatever lift. I found something consistent, and managed to go up to 4,500 ft, but the wind was 8 kts from the west, so I thought that this was just a convergence. But then, Jim Indrebo reported that he was in a wave and at 7,000 ft a few miles south of where we were. So, after gaining another 500 ft, I headed south to see what was there. And indeed, there was a wave. I eventually climbed up to 9,000 ft in that wave, and that was the top. The wind was about 25 kts from the west at that point.

The unique thing about today's wave was, because we had so much moisture in the air, the clouds generated unbelievable view over the pacific ocean and the west coast. I was flying way above the clouds. It was a very interesting 3 hour flight.

Click here to view more photos of this flight.

Flying over a gap between wave bars

A surreal view

Crazy Creek gliderport

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