David Whittle <<david.whittle>>
writes:

The first cross country flight of 2017 from the Florida Ridge

Thursday and Friday on XCSkies indicated Sunday to be the best day of the
weekend. Saturday had a change with stronger winds forecast and slightly lower
chance of a cross country flight. Sunday morning's forecast reiterated this
change.  The only thing that remained consistent was the wind direction 10
mph from the South.

Arriving at the park at 10:45 AM, there was little aerial activity. The sky was
mostly blue with a 13 mph wind on the ground. Once we completed rigging, the
first few tandems had been completed with Bo and Derreck advising that the lift
was good. In Bo's words we should have been in the air and on our way 30 minutes
ago. By then Leo, Ricardo, Ray, John, Marco and myself were rigged and ready to
make our way to the launch.

The task was an open cross country flight north loosely following US27. Leo was
first off with JJ dropping him off in lift just over take off. I was next,
Derreck swapping with JJ and towing me to the south and dropping me in a nice
thermal at 2800 (bit of an advantage to me). From release the thermal core was
200-300 ft min and with relative ease I was at cloudbase at 3800 ft.

The clouds looked to be well formed to the north. I picked a line straight north
and headed over the river. Leo had managed to get himself to cloudbase about
four miles to my west under another line of clouds.

Progress to the north was relatively easy with all clouds providing some degree
of lift, from 100 to 400 ft/min. Getting north of Palmdale, Leo was still on a
cloud line about four miles to the north west. We could not see each other and
the radio communications were not the best.

There is a notoriously weak area about six miles north of Palmdale The clouds
normally look like they should be working but never seem to deliver. We hit the
area about ten minutes apart and had to scratch and stop in anything to try and
make it to the clouds further north.

Midway between Palmdale and Lake Placid there are only a few landing fields with
plenty of orange groves. If you are high this is not an issue but with Leo and I
around 2000 ft we were struggling to find some decent lift. It seemed we both
selected the same landing field to the west of 27 and about five miles south of
Lake Placid.

I was scratching from bubble to bubble and getting nothing that would keep me
from landing. I spotted Leo to the west of the landing field turning in
something better than I was finding. I raced over to Leo and came in about 500
feet higher and very quickly settled into a nice 200 ft/min. Leo battled hard
but could not get any real meat from the bubbles and made the good decision to
land in the only safe landing field in the area.

By then I was near the southern tip of Lake Placid. There were decent landing
fields on the eastern side of the lake so I had time to find a decent thermal
before proceeding north. I connected with a nice thermal just on the shore of
the lake. There were a few buzzards flying around me and the thermal was solid.
It was a chance to ride over the center of a big lake secure that I was going up
with good landing options on the lake side if the thermal died.

Once at cloudbase of 4000 ft it was time to push ahead and see if I could make
the large landing filed south of Sebring. There were plenty of clouds on the
route at different stages of development, not all produced lift, but there were
enough of them allowed me to make my goal field with ease.

The sky ahead was blue with limited landing options available below. The image
from XCSkies of where the areas of lift were expected and where they stopped was
burnt into my mind and that imaged showed that this was the northern tip of the
area of lift.

A nice landing into an 8mph wind on a big grassy field, 2:30 hours in the air
and 80 km.

Marco was late to launch and made about 15km landing next to the sand pits
directly north of the park, we got to see the movie over a beer. Leo made about
45 km and two hours in the air. Ray who remained at the park managed to get 5000
ft up the sunny side of the clouds, coupled with two hours of flying, not bad
for the 1st of January 2017. Steve a paraglider pilots from Maryland did the
honors and provided a first class retrieve to all of us.

http://www.paraglidingforum.com/leonardo/flight/1551519