Friday june 20

[Kabir]

Did you guys see the clouds today!

I was running errands by costco And was blown away by the size and quality.
But above all, by the hight!
How high you think?

We raced to the ranch and fond it pretty still
Which made me super exited and pretty nervous at the same time.
put all the food away and raced to alternator
Montecito said S at 8 so it seemed doable
And the clouds!

Got to launch, got dressed in record time (felt like a dork dressing up in layers on a 100 day...)
Cycles seemed pretty mellow
Mostly SW with some S thrown in the mix.

Saw some birds cruising and was a bit disappointed that they where not shooting for the moon.

Caught a cycle and WHAM!

Someone turned the wind on on me!
What the heck!

I was making little progress getting to the second spine.
realized that the day was not what i though, at all.

It felt like a pretty serious sw and it made me concerned since i did not ant to be in the rotor near westbowl

Soon enough i realized that i did not want to commit to going around westbowl w/o some real lift.
Thought of top landing on the road or something
then i "caught" a thermal that was more horizontal than vertical that took me to la cumbre.
Every time i tried to push back into it I hit serious sink.

It was never too active and I never felt that i could loose my glider
But sure was hard trying to figure out the day

I realized that the road was not an option any more I made a play for Robins (so much for taking pictures of the oil rigs...)
I was in as much speed bar as i can push on my summit 3
I got parked trying to get some more hight over cathedral
I was told that at some points i was actually flying backwards... jikes!
Thank God for speed bars

I was not very comfortable going to Robins any more so I turned with it and went to Parma
(I've learned first hand what this kind of conditions do trying to push head first into it)
Over Parma I checked in with mission control and we agreed that i could probably make the beach.

I was on full speed the whole time.
basically left cathedral with 3200 and ended at the beach. Did not even stop to tank up anywhere.

The whole thing went by really quick, no time to really think about what was going on

I was blown away landing at the beach and finding basically no wind. (I love sand!)

I think that I was swimming against cloud suck
Because there was no real wind showing anywhere that I could see

Now I know that when clouds that big show up.
You better launch below them (to go to 15k) or towards them.
It was "fun" learning this empirically.
But I hope next time I remember what the the manual said about big clouds.
I still want to know if we could have gone to 15 k.....
Tiger?

There is always tomorrow!
Ojai?