Wow, what a weekend. The weather was fantastic, although Saturday was a little better as it wasn’t quite as windy. Thanks to everyone for helping out each day, particularly Ted for driving the winch on Saturday and Kym Carter for spending the day on the winch on Sunday.
On Saturday, Dennis Medlow decided he needed more familiarization of the Air Force Cadets DG1001 and spent 2 hrs 25 mins doing so. Unfortunately, as he wasn’t flying something a bit better, like the K13, he only topped out at 7500’ as opposed to 7700’ that Kym Zeppel and Derek Spencer got to. The flight Kym and Derek had was magic. They had 1 hour and 37 minutes and timed the flight to perfection as they touched down just as the sun was disappearing behind the hills.
On Sunday, the wind was a bit stronger, gusting 15 – 20 knots from the north, north-east. This meant the thermals were more broken but we were still getting good climbs. The highest Derek got was 6800’ with Ben Carter. The wind meant that they drifted a long way downwind. By the time they climbed to 4000’ or so, theywere south of the hwy but, with good climbs around, getting back into wind wasn’t too difficult. Leigh got flight of the day in the K8 with 2 hours but if he had had a bottle and didn’t have to make a pit stop and re-launch, it would have been 3 hours 20 minutes.