World Record Encampment
For the first time this WRE we get a bit of the old over running with cu's streaming across a wide swatch of the local area at about 1000' AGL soon after sunrise. By 10:00 AM the cu's are gone as they rise to the inversion. Still with such a good sign we are ready for another day of flying.
Zippy is off first at 10:15 AM. I'm second at 10:30 and BJ third after me. Zippy finds lift at 200 fpm at 5.5 miles out. I glide without finding any lift and land at 7.6 miles out to the northeast. BJ finds lift and stays up also. Pete launched at 12:20 PM and was over 4,000' at 1 PM.
The cu's reform around 12:30 PM and by 1:30 PM the whole area between Brownsville and Uvalde (about 170 miles north of Zapata).
As I write this at 4:15 PM they are all three still in the air. BJ and Zac are together at 175 miles out entering the hill country. Pete is 120 miles out.
Robin Hamilton <<Robin.Hamilton>> reports from his flight on his Swift yesterday:
Yesterday was a fun flight. The first segment was pretty much as Davis indicated on the Oz Report with weak broken lift scattered along the course up to Laredo. Rarely higher than three grand and with a 10-15kt SSE tailwind. By the 83/I-35 junction the steady but slow progress and lack of clouds up north, etc. indicated that it was unlikely we would be landing up in the Panhandle so I decided to head up towards San Antonio so as to reduce the drive time home to Houston. At first, progress up I 35 in the blue was pretty good, I had a quartering tail and was rarely above 5,000' but the lift was solid 600-900 fpm and regular.
I had to slow down in slower lift passing under a broad cirrus field around halfway to San Antonio. Got going again on the other side of the cirrus and by then there were good clouds with reasonable base at 7,500 - 8,000'. I got to the outskirts of San Antonio (around two hundred miles from Zapata) by 4 PM and so started off crosswind towards Houston along I-10 (approximately 200 miles from San Antonio). This is a new style of XC flying where the pilot follows the retrieve driver.
There was another two and a half hours of strong conditions and clouds that allowed good crosswind progress. It softened off and blued out about halfway along I-10 and so I landed around eighty miles from Houston at 7:30 PM. Probably over 300 miles flown, which was not bad considering a large part was crosswind. Was packed up and back home almost in time for dinner. Certainly beats the alternate that would have been Karl and I, RedBull crazed, driving half the night through the Hill Country, white knuckles, dodging wildlife.
Big learning for me from yesterday was that flying in the blue up to Laredo, although nerve wracking, seems very doable. The great clouds and base over by San Antonio also got me wondering if there might be a start point over towards Corpus that could better serve our needs in a predominant southerly flow. It is an area of the state that has had more early and sustained cloud street development than anywhere else all summer.
http://OzReport.com/1249420529
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