The wind moves from southeast to southwest in an hour and calms
down

The forecast for Friday looked like it would be a good day to go
long to the north. But in the morning the wind was a little too strong for
comfort and the cu's looked ratty. I thought that we wouldn't be flying after
all.

Then between noon and 1 PM everything changed. The winds on the ground died down
and switched direction to the southwest from the southeast. The winds calmed
down back to the "this might be fun" range when it comes to turbulence, with
winds with a west component, so I quickly got out to launch and was again the
first one up.

Pinning off at 1,500' AGL I found 89 fpm and just stuck with this beautiful soft
lift as I drifted north northeast. The wind was only 4 mph so the idea of
heading north because of the strong forecasted winds was no longer valid. I
decided to head up wind and found a much better thermal (in terms of strength)
over the swamp east of Quest Air and climbed to 5,000' in perfectly delightful
air.

I was having a sweet time but everyone else was falling out of the sky. There
were cu's to the south west so I headed up wind and got under them. The lift was
weak at about 100 fpm, but again it was so nice and I was just loving the air as
I drifted at 8 mph to the northeast.

My goal had changed to the Seminole sailplane port upwind to the south. The cu's
were moving through very quickly. There was a blue hole to the south and I
wanted to get high enough to make the odds of being plenty high on the south side of
the blue hole quite good so that getting lift there would be without any drama.

Three slow climbs later, I gave it a try but not wanting to risk landing out I
turned around just before I made it to the southern clouds. Plenty of lift going
back to Quest, of course, and it was struggle getting down.

Looks like we could have some reasonable flying in the coming days. It could go
either way with forecasts conflicting about the strength and direction of the
winds. Students are soloing here.

Yet another landing with the bare feet on the base tube:
https://vimeo.com/65939196