The Quike

I went to Melbourne for the weekend and stayed with Hamish, the bike store down the road had 20% off all the bikes they had on the floor so after 4 months of procrastination I couldn't reasonably hold off any longer. I felt pretty comfortable on this one but it's not quite what I ended up buying, apparently this model is pretty hard to get parts for:



On Saturday night a bunch of us went into the city to see Mark Watson as part of the comedy festival, having a drink in Federation Square before the show we came across this:



Check out Roger and Megans website at www.steppebysteppe.com.au - what an awesome adventure they are going to have!

Also at Easter

Easter in Manilla...or was that Bright? Or Manilla....

Finally decided to go to Bright for Easter, but not before 5 or 6 reversals between going north or south and silently declaring I was never going to try and forecast the weather again - I was leaning towards Bright at the time so there I went.
On Friday we headed out of Bright to fly at The Pines. There was an interesting mix of air out there - with a strong SE forecast we were surprised to arrive at launch and find absolute calm. After launching we even had a slight tailwind heading towards Bright at times which got us all excited about flying home. Staying up on the flats in front of the launch was easy with some BIG dusties kicking off now and then but every time we left the 5x5 Km square in front of launch it was into a whole world of sink. We still flew for a couple hours and in reality it would have been soarable hours before we launched had we faffed less.

Pic of me by Michael Roelens, looking towards Mt Buffalo

Saturday was a stunning day in Bright, I've somehow done more flying in Bright this season than anywhere else and this was the best day all summer. Climbs were a bit slow down low but above about 1200m it was game on. Nice Cu which filled in throughout the day and strong consistent climbs - I had the vario pegged out a couple of times :-)

Antje enroute to the Big Shed

At Easter the Skyhigh club from Melbourne run a similar gig to the State of Origin in Manilla where a group of pilots with lower airtime team up with pilot with somewhat more airtime and try to fly around. I had my own group of fledglings in Lauren, Jenny, Jim and Ilin, although Ilin doesn't count as he's a gun now! It was great just flying around the valley as there were loads of sailplanes around towing out of Porepunkah. The sailplanes are fun to thermal with but they never seem to climb for long, on a day like today I'd guess they get one decent climb to somewhere near cloudbase and then spend the rest of the day flying the ridges and averaging out the whole sky.

We took our own apple harvesting machine to Kamp Krusty...

On Sunday and Monday we flew some tandems with Antje's housemates who came up from Melbourne for the occasion. Geoff and I did a couple rounds, they weren't long flights but I'm really enjoying flying the tandem.

Weekend Warrioring

Checked the forecast on Thursday, out of habit really and noticed that it was looking about as good as it gets for Manilla. Having been away the previous week nobody was really keen to do the drive and there was talk of flying the Hunter Valley, 2.5 hrs closer than Manilla so I couldn't convince anyone. I drove myself as I was too late to get a ride with another car load and couldn't convince anyone else to come up and certainly couldn't convince myself to stay at home. Saturday had very weird cloud early on and nicer cloud after about 1pm, got to 2300m then glided into the dirt in less than 10Km. Oops.

Sunday looked as classic as any day I've ever flown in Manilla. 15-20k tail wind, perfect Cu from horizon to horizon. I climbed out to 2300m with JJ and Shep and we headed west. 15Km out I'd picked the paddock I was going to be landing in right behind Shep when I saw his glider pitch back and he screamed away. I flew in under him, about 50m off the deck before I got the climb...and we were away. Again. The sky was saying 5m/s climbs everywhere - we hardly found anything more than 2m/s and usually fluctuating between that and zero. Very frustrating. I got to Narrabri and pushed it past 90km in 4 hours and then had to leave the best climb I'd found all day to spiral down and land as JJ had already gone out of his way to retrieve me. It was easily on for Wee Waa (130km) and if I didn't have to be back in Sydney I'd have thanked JJ and sent him on his way. But looking at gliding down the train line west of Narrabri at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon with no retrieve was a very lonely prospect.

Thanks for the ride JJ!



Photo is the sunset on the way home as I managed to forgot to fly with my camera both days... :-(