We met again at Treats an 10 AM and found out that Olli turned
around and landed back at Mystic after getting over the Happy Valley and seeing
that the lift was dying. So Scott Barrett won the day with Olli second. The rest
of us were third, except the pilots that didn't launch in fourth.

The weather forecast for today from RASP was for southwest winds, but the
mountain weather sites at Mt. Hothan and Falls Creek were showing north at ten
to twelve knots. XCSkies predicted west winds at seven knots at launch level at
Mt. Emu with nine knots southwest winds at 6,000'.

The regional forecast was for west to southwest winds. The large regional flows
shown in RASP called for southwest winds. We decided to go up Mt. Emu as we had
also heard that it was passable with two wheel drive cars.

The road up Emu was negotiable by two wheel drive, but it wasn't pretty. Later,
when the drivers were going down, a tree had fallen across the road which caused
quite a bit of havoc.  Very fortuitously the fire brigade was checking the
roads and clearing them and came along just in time to cut away the tree.

On the way up we saw east winds going up the face of the Tawonga Gap Launch,
north winds in the valley, west winds in the valley going going  up to
launch. At the Emu launch itself it was right up the face, which faces
southwest. These were thermals coming up the launch. The wind was out of the
west.

We set up and launched around 1:30. Carey first, then me, then Scott, then
Andrew. Later others. The lift was very weak and the wind was fourteen mph out
of the west. The thermals were trashed as could be seen by the few blow apart
cu's that had been nearby. You could watch the cu's on the west side of the
valley (there were one or two) get blown east then disappear about half way
across the valley.

We worked the north launch face in the sunshine working less than 200 fpm for
maybe five or ten minutes barely getting back to launch level. Then Scott,
followed by Andrew and Carey headed north up the valley along the ridge line. I
stayed back a bit and watched slowly moving north and staying in the zero sink.

They continued and after a while they got lower and lower and it looked like
Andrew and Carey were landing. Scott had jumped back to the ridge line a bit and
stayed up but I couldn't see him. I went back to the north launch and climbed up
600' over launch, much higher than these three left with.

There was a sailplane on the ridge. He had gone out to where Scott was and came
back low under me. Not a good sign of lift down that direction.

I decided that I didn't like the air and headed for the valley where it turns
out there was plenty of buoyant air. The wind was strong out of the west so I
landed in a field east of the airfield. Half an hour later Wesley launched, flew
down over to the airfield and found a solid core of 600 fpm to 600' over launch.
He went north up the valley found nothing came back and went back up again at
500 fpm. Finally after a bit more of this he was able to land at the airfield.

Scott stayed in the air for a while but he didn't get past Coral Bank. Not a
great day to say the least.

Looks like a good day tomorrow with light winds.

The winds were north until 6 PM at Mt. Hotham and Falls Creek and then turned
south southeast. This is just a hard place to call the winds.