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.
No comments:
Post a Comment