Great flying conditions last few days, students flying high!

[Dave Turner]

Hi guys!

First post here on the forum, and just wanted to say hi! We've had such great flying conditions almost every single day for the last few weeks- it hardly seems like mid-winter! Lots of good people up at launch, and everyone seems to be having a great time. Today and yesterday we had new Eagle pilots taking their first high flights, and everyone was psyched! Yesterday some of the new guys stayed up for an hour and a half! The Eagle van has been busy!

1-16-2014 was pretty nice, we took two laps up to Skyport with our students. Just me, and five new pilots, and everyone flew and had a great time. After they all took their first lap from the peak, I waited up there for the the second lap; and in a short amount of time, they were all back up and ready to go for another round of thermals! After I got all of them safely off launch, I flew as well, and soared around with JR, Hammer, and Max (all on HG's). Then we all glided out to the beach, as the upper layers (above 3,200 feet) were starting to get bumpy from the N wind mixing in with our S flow.

After landing on the beach, the students went and got the van, and we all met up at East Beach to clean out our gliders and just generally hang out, discuss our flights, and have a good time.


1-15-2014 was an even better day. Both Tom and Chuck took their 4th and 5th high flight with us, and they stayed up for almost two hours total, over their 2 flights for the day!

The good weather looks like its going to continue, forecast looks great. See you up at Skyport! If anyone wants to go tandem, let us know!


-Dave Turner
Mammoth Lakes CA (but pretending to be a SB resident for a few 'winter' months!)

[sd]

First post here on the forum, and just wanted to say hi!

Dave, welcome to our South Coast flight discussion forum. As you probably realize, Santa Barbara is somewhat unique in the winter months because we have a steep colorful range that runs east-west collecting sun head on. 34 degrees latitude plus another 20ish degrees of winter tilt result in a sun angle that equates approximately to our mountain slop angle. Our steep mountains are also excellent at blocking the north wind, and we aren't in the Santa Anna catabatic drain path, so when the rest of So Cal is blown out, it's often pleasant flying here on the South Coast. The cold ocean works against us in the summer, but on cold spring days, the warm ocean moderates the morning inversion permitting early launches. Ojai is further inland so it has larger temperature swings and later launches, but it will typically have a stronger afternoon lapse rate and work later, so it's not uncommon to have a 4 or 5 hour soaring window even on short winter days. Please note that this winter has not been typical. Parma is normally green and lush in January, but we've been roasted by one dry Santa Anna event after the next.

Back in the 90s we relied on Jim Maddox to publish our newsletter, Wind Song. Not sure if anyone has the old articles archived anywhere. We transitioned to an on-line discussion forum around the turn of the century. Prior to the internet explosion, it was common to have large turnouts at Rusty's for monthly club meetings. The on-line discussion board was a focal point for about 10 years, but with the advent of smart phones and social media, we have become further fragmented.

Tools like Twitter are good for real time distributed communication, but the discussion board still serves a purpose when we want to communicate something more than a text message.

Your contributions to our board will be greatly appreciated. I reviewed some of your noteworthy flights on Leonardo at: http://paraglidingforum.com/leonardo/pilot/0_30215

A picture is worth a thousand words, but insight into your thought process could be a huge tool benefiting even us old salty students. Most of your Leonardo entries have little to no narrative. Hopefully you will share your perceptions and decision making on local flights via this forum. You don't have to double enter, just include a link to your Leonardo Track Files with a few words describing the link contents.
Tim Barker's question about following the back ridge makes more sense to me now that I have reviewed a few of your flights, including the one from EJ's to Santa Paula on Jan 2
http://paraglidingforum.com/leonardo/flight/859369
and your California PG record on 7/14/2013
http://paraglidingforum.com/leonardo/flight/786198

Look forward to flying with you soon and let us know what you were and are thinking.

[Dave Turner]

Tom-

Thanks for the warm invite to the forum and local club, I'm psyched to be here in sunny Santa Barbara and flying with all of you guys. I have seen you write-ups before, and we have actually met at launch a few quick times.

As you noted before, I have posted only a few of my flights on the Leonardo site, and don't really write much about them. I have only ever written one quick trip report really, here it is-

http://www.paraglidingforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=p370846

Thanks for welcoming me here, glad to be part of the group. So, now let's go out and fly, and have a tale worth writing about!

Dave