February 14, 2013: No distance today

XC skies forecast the top of lift at 2800 meters.  It didn’t happen.

Thermaling up with 5 of my new best friends

I launched around 12:30 and climbed up to cloud base over the back topping out at just under 2000 meters.  There were some nice clouds calling me and I went on glide and headed for the first one following the Boggabri-Manilla Rd towards the gap.  I caught it and was soon up at cloudbase looking for the next.  As I continued towards the gap but missed a thermal I know had to be coming off a huge brown field and then I scratched low while drifting west ending up 22K from launch. 

I went for this cloud and it worked!

As I was hiking to the road I noticed things started to look familiar.  I had landed on the property of the farmer who had towed the rolled Holden Jackaroo away from the road.  15 minutes after I had packed up and was hiking towards the road Mary Beth arrived.  She still has absolutely no memory of the accident.
Driving back the clouds to the southeast still looked good so I decided to give it another try.  It was only 2:30 and I could be back in the air by 3:30 if I was lucky.  On the way back we picked up Amanda (part time “basher” driver) who had landed quite a ways inland and had hiked to the road.  She rode with us all the way back to the East launch with us and picked up the “basher” and drove it back down to Godfrey’s farm.  Nice to collect money from her for a change instead of the opposite.

I launched a second time and quickly found a thermal that took me up to 2000 meters.  I didn’t want to go over the back again and figured I would save Mary Beth some retrieve time by trying to fly back to Manilla into a headwind.  I found one good climb after leaving the first thermal but flying into a headwind I was only moving forward around 15 kph or so (less than 10mph) .  It would take a long time to get to Manilla at that speed.  After about 5k on a 15k trip I was out of ideas and altitude.  I landed next to the road packed up and waited for Mary Beth to arrive.

Running out of altitude and ideas

I ended the day with two flights and 2:22 minutes in the air.  You can’t always measure progress in distance traveled.  I had some good climbs today and made some progress on smoothing out my turns while coring thermals.  The low scratching didn’t always take me up to cloudbase but I stayed up longer in some low altitude work than I have on some previous flights.