The pilots were fighting a strong, 14 mph, northwest wind. Larry
was able to get to over 10,400' climbing quickly at almost 700 fpm. It was an
out, upwind almost 50 km, and back.

Larry writes:

A big opening day at Enjoy yesterday. The Skew-T chart predicted
cloud base at over 10000'.

We wanted to do a big triangle but up high the winds were predicted to increase
to above 15mph. We set up a triangle task anyway and Kris took off on the first
leg into the blue off to the east.

After I took off, I got low, very low after the first glide, down to 600' AGL. I
then decided to abandon the cloudless route and headed west toward clouds. I
flew amongst the clouds for the next 5+ hours zigzagging to the west and finally
getting a thermal that lasted long enough to get me to base at 10445'. This was
the highest a hang glider has climbed to in Illinois, based on my knowledge of
previous flights in this area.

http://ozreport.com/pub/images/855_LarryBunner.igc