Fly as far as you can....meet.

Saturday day a group of us headed out to Standard to try and put on some miles. My instructor, John Jensen has taken off the next week to try and get in some air time. The last couple day’s have sucked. Thursday it snowed so we let things’ dry up Friday. Saturday was calling for strong SW winds. Standard was the call as the winds were forecast to be a little lighter than Vulcan. Driving out the wind was strong already and we had some high cirrus cloud. We headed out early to get as much out of the day as possible. With the high cloud I wasn’t expecting much out of the day. We dragged Graham up a couple times as he was looking for some practice. He hasn’t started themaling yet. John had started to set up but the wind was straight across the road. I was already set up so Micheal towed me up and flew to the east end of the tow road so we could tow straight into the strong west wind. I got a very high tow but we still had milky overcast cloud over us still. I didn’t find much for lift and landed and waited for conditions to improve. Martin, another student, was also out and we towed him up next. The high cloud was pushing east and we had some blue sky over us with a few nice looking CU’s. Micheal said his girlfriend Sandra would tow me up if I wanted to go. It looked like a small window so I took him up on his offer. I suited up and loaded onto the truck. Sandra towed me up over 2000’ and I released into a nice thermal. I gained another 1000’ before I lost the lift and ran down wind to get under the CU’s that were heading east, fast! When I caught up to the clouds I found some good lift under them. I climbed up to 9000’ and looked around on where I was going to go. I headed east towards some nice looking clouds. My next climb I got over 10’000’ and started to lose sight of the ground. I pulled in to get away from the cloud. There was high overcast cloud ahead so I was pushing cross wind to the north jumping cloud streets to let the overcast area push ahead of me to the east. The lift was easy to find and I never got lower than 6000’. I avoided getting over 9000’ as some of the clouds looked big and black. I could see a lot of rain cells all over. I didn’t try to climb to fast as I wanted to let the front push east a head of me. I kept pushing north and then headed east when I had nice clouds in front of me. I climbed under a dark looking cloud to 9000’ and headed on glide. I continued east. As I went on glide I kept climbing and pulled on more and more speed to try and maintain a zero sink rate. When I had the bar stuffed and was still climbing I was very glad I had given myself 1000’ clearance from the clouds. Once I got away from the cloud suck I tried to pick a line to maintain zero sink. I had a 20km glide between two walls of rain showers under over cast cloud. I was running for some sun I could see off in the distance. I arrived 1500’ off the ground and search the area for some lift. There were some bits of lift around but I was reluctant to try and work anything as it was just barren grass land east of me with no roads in site. I didn’t find any good cores and didn’t want to drift off in broken lift. The wind was very strong and my glides were averaging 100km/h ground speed. I set up my landing in the last farm before the tiger country and got kicked around coming in. I stayed on the base tube right to the ground. Just as I was finishing packing up the land owners came over and spent the next 3hrs visiting with me while I waited for my ride. They informed me I was 30km SE of Hanna. I was surprised to find out I had made it that far. When I called John he told me no one else was able to get away. Moore hit the road to come and get me. He picked me up last year too when I landed 5miles south of Hanna after I flew there from Vulcan last spring. Thanks to Micheal for the tows and Moore for picking me up, again.

Flights 2 Air time 2:30 distance 215km.