pine friday

[andy dainsberg]

brendan, ron f, tom p, treeman and i drove ourselves up to pine. click click KABOOM! ron had the day: testify!

tom and ron 2k over me at 12k

[Mark Miyahara]

Good day to play hookie. Got a text that today was to be epic conditions ...so I went for it. Surf was definitely up. Ron got caught in a rip tide but gave us a heads up to watch out for it. 1450 fpm thermals in areas I flew. Had my personal best altitude of 11,890 ft. 4TH off launch.,Brendan patiently waited while I fused with my radio. Got to over 10000 and started otb to try and follow Ron,Tom and Andy but started dropping like a rock. Turned back to try and tankup more as Brendan passed over me. I saw him dropping steadily also and I decided to play around launch and then over to the sandpile,since my truck was parked there, so we could have faster retrieval. Hit my highest altitude just west of the sandpile. Practiced doing some spirals and b line stalls while in lift. Some of the spirals never could exceed the lift rate! It started to od and tried to stay ahead of the cloud suck so after about an hour I decided land before the lz conditions might get to rough. Landed without incident and went out to chase the guys down. Great day, great guys ...thanks for the text.

[Faoro_Ron]

With eight degrees of lapse between 6,000 and 9,000 and eight between 9,000 and 12,000 all week long, we were eager to see the east wind back down at Pine so we could take a whack at it. Tom Pipkin texted me at 6:30 AM and by 6:32 we had decided to fly. We called the chronically underemployed to partake and headed for Mecca.

Benson Lamb kindly loaned me his new Airwave Cobra; I wanted to try the three riser wing with a glide over 9.0. I crossed my risers on the first hook-up - no surprise to those who know me - so Tom Pipkin stopped drooling long enough to push ahead of me and got off the hill first. As I spread out, the other pilots "ooohed and aaahed" at Tom's perilous ascent in a raggedy and rowdy thermal directly off launch. I never saw it, so Tom would bear better witness, but it was a harbinger of things to come.

The Cobra launched nicely when it was hooked up correctly and I entered the thermal of a lifetime about thirty seconds later. How big was this munificent thermal? God only knows. The only way to put it from experiencing it myself would be to say that it felt more like the whole earth fell away rather than the thermal lifted me up. BIG, yes, but with a kind, smiley face written all over it - not scary at all. It bode for a very decent day, but that wasn't to be the case. This bad boy, suma wrestler-sized thermal zipped us up toward cloudbase in no time. The sky was rapidly overdeveloping in places and we looked to the Lockwood Valley for step two. But my thermal wasn't done with me yet. It took me to an incredible 17,999 feet before I (finally) located some sink to turn in. With an 18,000 foot ceiling for our aircraft, it will be a lifetime best in altitude. And right over launch, not 15 minutes after takeoff. The predicted 18,000 foot temperature of -13 Celsius seemed fairly accurate to my exposed face. But I wound my way down to a more reasonable 16,500 feet and headed eastbound.

Now, I was over the back, just west of Dry Canyon. You'd like to switch to a hang glider at this point, in certain situations. There was a little bit of east wind and a lot of dead, silent air. Not a beep from the vario after it had been making noises commonly heard only in bad science fiction or horror movies five minutes earlier. Tom and Andy dirted in the 50-50 and I only hooked a weak one over the Badlands as I headed toward sun at Guillermo. Now Brendan reported going down at the ranch and Mark was retrieving. I only made it out of the Badlands with a thousand feet to spare; where did all that altitude go? There was sun over the small hills in the north of the Lockwood Valley, east of the Boys' Camp. I caught a good flatland thermal at 500 AGL, rode it up 6,500 feet to about 12,600. That would be my last thermal of the day. I looked over at the Antelope Valley. There was a cloud street north of the Tehachapis and over the Liebres, but none extended the length of the valley. Incredibly, things were flattening out, only one big, active cumi over Hungry Valley. Virga at Pine Mountain and over Mount Pinos. I limped over to Frazier and found nothing. Landed by the cement plant, testing my object fixation skills by getting both feet on top of a fence rail in the strong east wind - jumped back to the ground.

Waited for an hour in the gentle rain, the smells in the valley incredible - wet sage and chaparral. One hour, forty minutes; seventeen miles from launch.

We plan to try it again today.

[Tony Deleo]

Congratulations Ron-I haven't heard of anyone getting any higher at takeoff!