Today was organization day. The Dragonflies arrived a little
before 1 PM flying from Thunder airfield in San Antonio. I had three short
packed Northwing Freedoms and was waiting for a little guidance before setting
mine up. But finally I realized that I was going to have to figure it out on my
own. It wasn't hard and I made only one slight error which I'll correct
tomorrow.
The 13 to 15 mph wind has been blowing all day and cloud base was about 500' at
10 AM. It rose as the day progressed and probably was over 4,000' at 2:30 PM.
Ken Robinson and I were ready to launch after reorganizing all our instruments
etc to fly single surface gliders. Kent broke a weaklink at 100' and illustrated
how rough the air was.
I got pulled to 1,500' AGL (500' is the elevation here) in air that seemed
rougher than it was I had to get used to towing this glider in these conditions.
My timing was way off, of course.
I pinned off was it got to be a little too much but in spite of the fact that
there seemed to be lift and the sky was full of beautiful cu's, I didn't find
anything. The wind was really strong. This was the wind forecast for the day:
This forecast (and the next two days look similar) was for stronger winds
relative to anything that we
saw in Florida this Spring. This is the kind of forecast you want to see when
you are in Zapata for the WRE.
There were cu's all day and there still are at 8:30 PM.
The cu's at 1:45 PM:
Kent had a second tow to 2,500' and didn't find anything under all the beautiful cu's. I
had a second tow and pinned off at 100' as I got high over the tug. We'll try
again tomorrow.
Here's a look around and a look at the Northwing Freedom 170. The version that I
am using is all Mylar with a faired control frame and faired cross bars.
