Blown out

Shaunia and I getting ready for our morning flight.

Day two Nat’s. I got up early to do a tandem flight before the afternoon task. The wind was strong out of the south. I arrived over the LZ with 700', enough to do one circuit before landing. The forecast is for strong winds today so we push the pilot meeting back to 2:30. The wind is still strong so we push it back to 4:30. I need every day to have any chance to get close and I’m anxious to get up the hill. By 4:00 the winds die off and we head up. The wind is still very strong on launch at times and we wait some more. I set up right away as the wind is with in my tolerance level. By 5:30 the wind isn’t calm enough to get every on off safely in time to have a fair task so the day is called. I launch a little after six and climb out in strong lift. I climb up to 11’000’ and head south. I decide to Parson and back which is the task we were thinking about. The wind is 30km out of the west at the top of the lift but I have no trouble heading down range. By seven things don’t seem quite as strong and the flying is more pleasant. I hit Parson and start to head back. The wind is all over the place depending on the altitude. I had some tail wind going out and some coming back.

When I got back to Mt 7 I spotted Calum Neff over the peak. I had just helped him with his first high flights last weekend. I was very excited to see him and raced over to fly with him on his first thermaling flight. I got to fly with him for an hour chasing around the mountain. I find the first thermaling flight to be more special than the first high flight. Just something about getting above where you’ve taken off from that is so thrilling. It also feels more like you have arrived as a pilot after working so hard to get to that point. We landed after 9:00pm in no wind. The landings were all great and we were grinning ear to ear. I had a three hour flight with a short cross country and got to share a momentous flight with a new pilot. I’m also not sure I have ever landed that late. Calling the day will put another nail in my coffin but it would have been a very stressful day for most of the field trying to call a task. The most important thing is for every one to have fun and making people fly today wouldn’t have been fun.