Miles in May

Well sadly the whole comp can be summed up in one post. We had a couple days we flew short flights followed by a few days of rain. The weather to the east was looking better so not wanting to sit in the rain for another day I suggested heading to North Battleford towards better weather.

We stayed at Larry's cabins on the lake and did a little man towing on the beach with Timmy's paraglider. We found a tow road Just north of North Battleford which worked out great. The locals were friendly and didn't seem to have a problem with us using the roads. The wind was strong blowing from 25 km/h to 35 km/h out of the east. We were on a line of two weather systems. To the west it was over cast and to the east was nice looking Cu's.

Ross and Doug launched early and weren't able to stay up. I wanted to wait a bit any way for the over cast to push further west. After Timmy took a couple tows and started to drift away I figured it was time to go. I pinned off in good lift and slowly climbed out and drifted down wind. I was feeling pretty rust and not flying very well. After working hard to get to cloud base at 9000' it was easier to stay up. I stayed high for all of the flight until I started to catch up to the overcast skies. Perhaps it was just my perception that the lift should be shutting down. Their was some lift around which was hard to work low in the strong winds. Not wanting to end up with a challenging landing I turned into the wind and landed. Ross managed to stay up for another couple hours and flew 220km. Doug Keller also landed a little further than me at 100km.

We went back to Daysland on Saturday for another windy day. It was similar to the North Battleford day with the strong wind making getting up difficult. I drifted away from the tow road before I landed. Many pilots took several tows. Those that did get up made the 100km goal easy.

Sunday wasn't a comp day but was the best XC day I'd seen in a long time. Since we were heading home we just made a short 22km task back to the golf course. The winds were light and the lift was very good. It got awesome at about 2:30pm. When I arrived over the golf course their was plenty of lift and climbing out was easy. Would have been a great race day. Hopefully we will have some more great days this summer.