Daniels Saturday July 6th

[mingram]

I flew for two hours and landed in front of Old Rag - 32k from launch! Wish I would have gone farther, but it's a flight I've always wanted to make. And one I'm gonna submit to the XC contest.

I took off at 12:30 after Syrus, Hossein, Petr, Krista, and Peter. Tom launched last. The sky was filled with nice clouds both small and very large dark bottomed ones that shaded the valley. Cloudbase was maybe 4000 ft. The air was a bit sharp/punchy. Krista reported 3-4m/s. Drift was strong.

I never got very high the whole flight. I flew down to the east end of the ridge and floated over the back. The wind picked up to 20+ mph around 2pm or so. And my downwind speed was about 40mph. A better pilot could have flown 100k.

In the last valley before Old Rag I wasn't high enough to commit to flying over the ridge and thought I would land and noticed how strong the wind was. That's when I caught a ripper 3m/s over big brown feilds to 3500 ft. Still cloudbase was another 500 feet higher and was a tall and dark so I stayed on the edge and drifted downwind. My line took me over lots of nice LZs the entire way. In the end I should have been a little more east over some little foothills, but the wind was strong and I just went downwind.

I landed vertically with no forward speed in a nice farm. When I was 3 feet off the ground I killed the glider by grabbing the C's and stalling it which worked really nicely and I was not dragged at all.

A nice retired farmer picked me up immediately and gave me a gatorade and a ride to 29 and the McDonalds in Madison and the whole crew showed up with my car 20 mins. later and we all went for ice cream.

It was a day you had to be there early and was borderline too strong, but worked out nicely.

http://www.livetrack24.com/tracks/username/mingram

[FlyingFelix]

NICE !!!
I should of been there today, XC flying is so exciting.
I'll join in next time.