Cliffside

Brett took me out to fly a site up the Columbia river, past Mt Hood. The picture is looking back towards Mt Hood to the west. Really dry, hot day with rough climbs not getting us very high. It was good 'get in touch with your glider' air :-) Brett flew about 25Km XC.

I want to ride my bicycle

Portland is possibly the most bike friendly city on the planet. To that end I did what locals do and headed straight to craigslist to find myself a shiny but no so new machine - $60 landed me a neat, 3-speed, coaster brake ultra simple step-thru straight out of the early 70's. Yeah so it's 'girls' bike, that doesn't make it less fun!

It's fantastic to ride around a city where motorists are actually courteous to cyclists and riders are seen as a positive part of the solution to a very big problem. A world away from Sydney where a person on a bicycle is simply considered an annoyance at best or a target at worst.

The day after yesterday

Today's forecast was for a slightly higher base and even less wind than yesterday. We all got excited about it, I was aiming for a 100K out and return but not long into the first climb I realised I was kidding myself. The day was definitely as good or better than yesterday, the air was sporty and I was so tired I was reacting to almost nothing. If you know Gary from Team America when he is 'making the signal', I felt pretty much like that.

I took a glide across the river and back to the nice green soccer fields. Lesson of the day, don't be too greedy. Or if you do plan on flying the day after a 7 hour flap, drink as much water as you can handle the night before and go to bed for 10 hours.

Chelan Open Day 6, Task 3

Well today was as forecast, absolutely astounding. The task committee (Josh Cohn, Keith Macullough, Eric Reed and Brian Webb) did a great job setting a 118Km triangle starting and finishing at the Chelan soccer fields.

A bit of a sink cycle about 10 minutes before the start had much of the field a few hundred metres below base but the glide across the Columbia to the SE is a bit shorter so almost everyone made it across and climbed immediately to 2800m. The clouds out in the flats were excellent and dust devils were going off in every direction, it was a race day for sure. Getting around the first turnpoint and the first half of the leg to Leahy (2nd point) was the fastest part of the day for me. The gaggle I was flying with dispersed and the clouds left us about 15Km from Leahy making that leg very slow. It was after 4.30pm by the time we got the Leahy turnpoint and while the flats will work til sunset the day was definitely slowing down. Regrouped at with Cherie Silvera, Dave Wheeler and a couple other pilots and we spent an hour turning in 1 m/s up or less and slowly pushing towards goal. At about 6pm we glided above a dusty which eventually got us back to 3200m and home with one more top-up on the way. The final glide was fairly tense - even with a 5:1 glide to goal 8Km out you still don't have a visual on it because of the high canyon edge on the Columbia river. Concerned, I grabbed aother 100m in a light climb about 6km out and then flew through lift all the way to goal. Course time was 6 hours and a few seconds for about 7.5 hours total. Over half the field (44 pilots) got to goal - the Chelan regulars said this was a pretty good day, but not the absolute best Chelan can turn on. Wow.

Might flight is here, final results are here.

Tomorrow looks even better than today.

Chelan Open Day 5 and a half

The weather tomorrrow is looking EPIC - light and variable with top of lift just over 10,000ft so stay tuned for reports of an amazing task tomorrow :-)

Chris Galli is here at the comp, one of the founders of the XC Skies weather forecasting service, if you haven't seen it, check out www.xcskies.com - pretty amazing tool he and a couple others have put together.

Chelan Open Day 5

It seems we are alternating, windy and flying days, today is windy.

We are camped out at Chelan airport, it's a reasonable tarmac strip with mostly single engine aircraft but a couple twins flying in and out each day. The airport is up on a plateau above the river and there is a steep ridge at the south end of the runway which is soarable and is actually a free-flying site.

On Wednesday night conditions were perfect and a few pilots had a go at it. You might think soaring in the climb-out path of an active runway a little too adventurous but it appears to be no problem. The Cessna I watched climb out had at least 50 metres clearance above them.