Air Shark last Sunday

[pengoquin]

Last Sunday I found another reason to love my Delta 2. Flying Skyport (SB) heading out from launch, came in just in front of and below Thermal Factory, about 100' over the ground. Caught a nice strong thermal and started circling up. A perfect day so far, looking good for XC. I climbed to about 300' over the ground, heading away from the hillside when all hell broke loose. I was circling left, but suddenly I just stopped and everything became dead calm, not a good feeling. I got ready for whatever was coming. I didn't have to wait long, smack, within a fraction of a second the wing jerked up and back harder than anything I've felt. I was ready to catch the wing as it was going to surge in front of me. Now I'm weightless and there is no pressure on my brakes, nothing at all. The wing appeared in front of me, strange ball shape. I prefer to have my wing directly overhead, especially with only a couple hundred feet of terrain clearance. Obviously this was a bad place to be in, not much time to get the wing back flying. The red handle flashed thru my mind, but I opted to focus on wing management. Within a flash I was under a 70% collapse, then 30%. Kept it flying straight with weight shift. The collapse was on the left side, just like the mountain. The wing responded perfectly, three hard pumps and I had a complete wing over head. After a short in air celebration, time to get back into the thermal and climbing up. At about 3,500' I hit a gusty OTB E/N/E wind, just plain nasty! Took the glide and ran to the beach. This was just about the most violent bit of air that I've run into and my Delta 2 reponded quickly with a near perfect recovery. Thanks to Bob A for the ride back to Parma.