This morning in Baltimore, the wind was howling. But what I saw online, 10mph surface winds and 16mph at 3000ft convinced me to give Woodstock a try. It was very much worth it, I had an excellent flight. Arrived at launch around 1.30pm and after convincing myself that I didn't have to worry about penetration with my PG, I launched about 1 hour later. Absolutely no worries about not being able to stay up. It was brain-dead soarable today. I immediately got up to around 500ft above launch and headed north. Above the right finger, I hit a boomer thermal. Wide, strong, consistent. The highest I saw on the vario was 6.2m/s (1240fpm), on the averager I have 5.2m/s (1040fpm). Took it up to around 2000ft over launch and then left it, because I didn't want drift too far back.
I headed north, direction Strasburg. Got quite far, but at a spot where the ridge was flatter with many trees, the wind got stronger and I got low, so I turned around. Headed south, past the launch and as far as I dared without risking to be flushed. Check out the picture illustrating my tracklog below - according to OLC rules, I covered a distance of 23.2kms (around 15 miles).
Later on, I took two more really solid thermals of the 5m/s class over the north finger, got all the way out to the bridge field and back, boated around and had a lot of fun. After about 2 hours into my flight, the winds switched noticeably north. Generally, the wind was totally fine to fly a paraglider - I always had at least 4mph of groundspeed hands-off, most of the times a lot more - no worries about penetration, it wasn't especially windy aloft. Finally, it went magic. Just before sunset, there was still 2m/s (400fpm) of lift, beaming me up to 1000ft above launch. More precisely, lift was everywhere. Even far out, past the LZ. I had to spiral pretty aggressively to get down, to end my flight before everybody else had left and it got dark. The last 500ft to the ground were a little turbulent. Before that, for how strong the lift was, conditions seemed very benign to me.
My total flight time was just a tad more than 2.5 hours today. So with my first 4 flights on the Mamboo in the US, I almost made 10 hours. I hadn't many such good flights here with the old glider. Just luck?!?
Cheers,
Marcel
PS: I don't really have the overview of who else (only HG) flew, and how well they did, so my report is just about my own flight.
Maybe we'll get some new younger, more eager observers, so grumpy old men like me can retire.