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.