The Sunday forecast called for a south wind (six to ten knots),
cu's, good lift (at least by 2 PM). It looked like my last chance to have a long
flight from Quest Air before heading west to the Texas Single Surface Shootout.
Russell towed me up at 10:40 AM as the cu's that we first saw at 9 AM continued
and looked like they would stay for the day. He pulled me just above cloud base
like he would in Zapata, between the cloud streets and then I had to fly to the
nearest street and get under it.
The lift was weak, even weaker than my flight a few days previously, which I
described as almost like Zapata. But now it was really weak and I had to be very
careful and very patient as I was barely climbing under the cu's. After four
cu's/thermals I was down to 2,000' from 3,000'. I wasn't climbing, I was over
Groveland, there was a cu two kilometers to the north on the other side of a
swamp over a dry hillside. I was down to 1,900' and needed to find better lift
to start getting up. I headed for the cu amusing it was either get up or land.
There was a thermal at the northern edge of the swamp over the dry hillside and
amazingly enough, given how weak conditions were so far, it averaged more than 100 fpm (just barely). With a five mph wind pushing me north northwest on my projected course line I just hung in the lift and looked
around at the nearby cu's trying to figure out if they would be working when I
got to them. They were only maybe 100' thick and not very substantial.
After working three thermals I was able to get to 3,000', still at 100 fpm. I
had to get a bit to the west to get over the Turnpike but the cu's were a ways
apart so I had to be careful and patient as I jumped cross wind. The wind was 10
to 11 mph from the south south of the Turnpike. I finally found a good thermal
at 1,700' at over 200 fpm to over 3,000'. I'd been in the air for an hour and twenty minutes and was only
twenty six kilometers north northwest of Quest Air.
While the lift was for the most part light it was also broken and rough. I
jumped over to the northwest to the fields north of the prisons still south of
the Turnpike. The fields are big and dry and I could see new cu's
forming. The lift was there but it was even worse than I had experienced so far.
It was broken and rough and not that much fun to fly in. I was thinking about
landing to get out of it.
But then I found a nice smooth thermal at 150 fpm and changed my mind about how
I felt about the flight. Getting to 2,800' I went north to the next clouds. I
noticed that the cu's were getting thinner as I headed north. I found a nice
thermal west of Lake Denham. This is a short (20 seconds) video of thermaling just east of
Wildwood:
After climbing back up I headed north northwest toward some cu's. Still I wasn't
all that pleased with the air. It looked like I should head north, as that was
the wind direction, but there were more cu's to the north northwest. I could see
some high overcast further north.
Flying north of Wildwood I decided that I wasn't having that much fun and that I
could go ahead and land. I flew under some scattered cu's and was going up at 300
fpm while flying straight There were plenty of huge fields around and I just picked out a good one
that wasn't a horse field (barbed wire instead of brown wooden fences). I landed
just outside Oxford, Florida after two hours of flying but only about 50
kilometers north of Quest Air.
