https://airtribune.com/2017-quest-air-cross-country/blog__day_13

Sara Weaver writes:

Today was my first day making a long goal.

My flight was 2.5 hours up to a maximum altitude of 5400. I tapped goal with
2500 feet of extra altitude, so I kept going to make my longest flight just a
tiny bit longer, at about 65 km (will have to double check the distance).

This is by far the best way I could think of to end this month, and I'm so
grateful to the amazing pilots who have been encouraging me along the way.

The sport class goal was Leeward, 64 km. This picture shows the
land fill (Baseline Recycling Center) in the background just to the northwest of
the goal. Later we told Sara to always go to that landfill as the bird flock
there and it's always rough and tough.

With lighter south southeast winds than yesterday and a forecast for convergence
up highway 301 to the north along the eastern side of the state we called an
open distance task, while Sara called a goal at Leeward for the sport class.

Greg Dinauer and I were the only ones to head open distance and later in the
flight we called Keystone Airfield, 147 km, as the goal. It was a nice place to
land and there was no need to go any further.

I was off first at 12:19 with Greg right behind me. I pinned off early and had
to fight to stay up getting down to 1,100' a couple of times before hooking it
at 450 fpm to 4,000' up to Greg who was patiently waiting at cloudbase. Once up
we were off together and flew together on purpose the whole way.

With a 8 to 20 mph south southeast tail wind we moved pretty quickly. South of
the prisons I took a run to the next cloud street to the west which Greg
disapproved of as there was a nice cloud just to our north. Down to 1,850' from
4,200' I found 100 fpm, which Greg joined me in.

We drifted quickly while climbing slowly until we were again low, me at 1,900'
and Greg at 1,200' right smack dab over a baseball game inside one of the
prisons. 30 fpm finally turned into 220 fpm and we climbed to 4,600'.

Our plan was to go north up 301 but the easterly component kept pushing us
toward Interstate 75. Northwest of Wildwood as we again climbed up from low (me
at 1,700') Greg suggested running to the northeast toward Leeward and when we
got up we did just that to get over highway 301.

It was after 2PM so the day was getting much better. We stayed pretty high after
that climbing up to 5,800'. We were able to ignore the patchwork of fields south
of Citra and Hawthorne and just jump from well formed cu to the next one.

As we approached Keystone it looked like we had it made but there are few
landing zones and plenty of lakes on the course line.  Greg wasn't sure
that we could make it and didn't want to go under the nice cu's over one
particularly large lake so headed for a fire to the northeast. Before we got
there and down to 2,100' we found light lift at 200 fpm that was enough to make
us feel comfortable about getting into the goal field.