Weather looked perfect so everyone was talking big air and big distance! A great turnout based on excellent weather projection.
However it turned out to be difficult day for me today with last place! .... Blazing hot on launch and not the best nights sleep. The east wind seemed stronger than expected. Aaron set a pretty ambitous tasks of 71km to Soboba and half way back to Sun City.
Most of us launched by 11:45 for a 12:30 race start and climbing out was not difficult although slow work.
The convergence was still several miles away to the west, marked by a single cloud. The first group of pilots headed west to check out the convergence. I followed along, only to find a strengthening east wind on the way back and huge sink. I think Jai Pal and possibly others didn't make it back, so got picked up and decided to relaunch. I got absolutely drilled on the way back, ending up about 200 ft above the house thermal about 10 minutes before race start time. 30 minutes hard work for nothing!
Climbed out again easily, and I met Len at around 6,000ft. Still no sign of the convergence clouds and the projected 10,000 ft top of lift. Jeff Williams seemed to be finding something down at the antennas at the other end of the plateau where the south wind comes in, so I decided to head towards there.
Len and I went on glide to the south and hit huge sink and headwinds! The wind seemed to have switched from east to south, perhaps the convergence was coming in more from south than west. So, ...huge sink and headwind flying west to east, huge sink and headwind flying north to south.....somewhere all this air must be being sucked upwards!
Len turned left into the headwind following the terrain. Wise choice. Unfortunately I turned the wrong way, thinking the lift would be over the antennas where the southeast would be coming up the slope! Nope! Screaming sink again, about 4.5 m/s this time, and with the ground rising up, I barely had time to calculate the safety of various glide out options to get off the plateau into the strong headwind.
Looking at the tracklogs later, I was only a couple of hundred meters away from where Len found the start of a thermal that went to 10,000ft!
Damn! Anyway, after putting safety first, I had an easy landing right on the retrieve road, and our driver Nico picked me up 30 seconds after I finished packing my bag. I briefly considered relaunching but it was starting to blow over the back so I decided to go home and spend the afternoon gardening instead.
Of course, everyone else went on to have epic flights up at 10,000ft along the convergence to Soboba. Last place today! Can I say damn again!
Tracklog and Flight Self Analysis
The key self analysis of this flight focuses on my decision making at several points. This was only my second time flying at this site, and Elsinore is know to be very 'technical' due to convergence, strong winds, potential rotor etc.
While none of the decisions were clearly 'right or wrong', they all added enormously to my stress level, which then accumulated into landing early. Call it cascading failure of judgement. The fact that of 13 pilots, only me and one other pilot missed getting really high and having great flights means that my own decision making was the reason.
The first decision was to follow other pilots downwind towards the convergence line (in direction of number 2 on the map). Based on my limited experience with flying at this site, this was probably not the best decision. Better would have been to simply explore in larger circles around launch to make sure I knew where the lift was. Also, thermalling up, then pushing forward to the edge of the ridge, and thermalling up again probably would have worked well to slowly get and stay high, as well as being more relaxing than the white knuckle glide into wind back from our little exploration...
The second decision was to fly southeast towards the antenna, which is where I first hit strong sink. The sink was so strong Len joked over the radio "I would sink less if I jumped out of my paraglider". This decision was based on a radio report from local pilot Jeff Williams that he was climbing out near the antennas. While the area of sink was pretty hard to predict, perhaps staying out in front of the ridge might have been a safer route south, given the east component to the wind, and the late developing convergence.
The third decision was to turn even further south to try and get to the antenna hill faster. That glide resulted in maximum sink of something like 4.5m/s as I turned into wind over the antenna (5).
Given that a normal paraglider glide ration is about 1.1 m/s in still air, 4.5m/s sink is really dramatic. You are going down at over four times the normal descent speed. It's potentially a high dangerous situation that needs to be assertively handled.
Here's a little math about my situation at that point. I did the whole calculation below mentally and instinctively in about 20 seconds at the time. The math came later... At 4.5m/s (approx 850ft/min) and 1000ft over the ground, I would have had less than a minute and a half before being on the ground right close to the edge of the plateau. The entire glide out to the valley of approx 2000ft would have been taken less than three minutes.
Flying at a forward speed of 23km/h (38km/hr trim speed minus 15km/hr headwind), I would have needed nearly 12 minutes to reach safe landing fields in the valley. At that sink rate however, I would have only been able to fly for 6 minutes, meaning a slope landing someone down in scrub covered ridgetops being a real possibility.
There would have been a high probability that once over the edge of the plateau, I could have ridge soared north again in the east wind. However, this assumption was pretty questionnable given the massive sink on the plateau. At Elsinore, once the west sea breeze rolls like a wave over the plateau, and then pours off the 2000ft drop to Lake Elsinore below, ridge soaring becomes almost impossible. I had no idea when this would actually occur, but at the time, it did seem that the sink I was experiencing might already have been the sea breeze rolling in a shutting everything down.
However it turned out to be difficult day for me today with last place! .... Blazing hot on launch and not the best nights sleep. The east wind seemed stronger than expected. Aaron set a pretty ambitous tasks of 71km to Soboba and half way back to Sun City.
Most of us launched by 11:45 for a 12:30 race start and climbing out was not difficult although slow work.
The convergence was still several miles away to the west, marked by a single cloud. The first group of pilots headed west to check out the convergence. I followed along, only to find a strengthening east wind on the way back and huge sink. I think Jai Pal and possibly others didn't make it back, so got picked up and decided to relaunch. I got absolutely drilled on the way back, ending up about 200 ft above the house thermal about 10 minutes before race start time. 30 minutes hard work for nothing!
Climbed out again easily, and I met Len at around 6,000ft. Still no sign of the convergence clouds and the projected 10,000 ft top of lift. Jeff Williams seemed to be finding something down at the antennas at the other end of the plateau where the south wind comes in, so I decided to head towards there.
Len and I went on glide to the south and hit huge sink and headwinds! The wind seemed to have switched from east to south, perhaps the convergence was coming in more from south than west. So, ...huge sink and headwind flying west to east, huge sink and headwind flying north to south.....somewhere all this air must be being sucked upwards!
Len turned left into the headwind following the terrain. Wise choice. Unfortunately I turned the wrong way, thinking the lift would be over the antennas where the southeast would be coming up the slope! Nope! Screaming sink again, about 4.5 m/s this time, and with the ground rising up, I barely had time to calculate the safety of various glide out options to get off the plateau into the strong headwind.
Looking at the tracklogs later, I was only a couple of hundred meters away from where Len found the start of a thermal that went to 10,000ft!
Damn! Anyway, after putting safety first, I had an easy landing right on the retrieve road, and our driver Nico picked me up 30 seconds after I finished packing my bag. I briefly considered relaunching but it was starting to blow over the back so I decided to go home and spend the afternoon gardening instead.
Of course, everyone else went on to have epic flights up at 10,000ft along the convergence to Soboba. Last place today! Can I say damn again!
Click the Map for Tracklog on Leonardo
The key self analysis of this flight focuses on my decision making at several points. This was only my second time flying at this site, and Elsinore is know to be very 'technical' due to convergence, strong winds, potential rotor etc.
While none of the decisions were clearly 'right or wrong', they all added enormously to my stress level, which then accumulated into landing early. Call it cascading failure of judgement. The fact that of 13 pilots, only me and one other pilot missed getting really high and having great flights means that my own decision making was the reason.
The first decision was to follow other pilots downwind towards the convergence line (in direction of number 2 on the map). Based on my limited experience with flying at this site, this was probably not the best decision. Better would have been to simply explore in larger circles around launch to make sure I knew where the lift was. Also, thermalling up, then pushing forward to the edge of the ridge, and thermalling up again probably would have worked well to slowly get and stay high, as well as being more relaxing than the white knuckle glide into wind back from our little exploration...
The second decision was to fly southeast towards the antenna, which is where I first hit strong sink. The sink was so strong Len joked over the radio "I would sink less if I jumped out of my paraglider". This decision was based on a radio report from local pilot Jeff Williams that he was climbing out near the antennas. While the area of sink was pretty hard to predict, perhaps staying out in front of the ridge might have been a safer route south, given the east component to the wind, and the late developing convergence.
The third decision was to turn even further south to try and get to the antenna hill faster. That glide resulted in maximum sink of something like 4.5m/s as I turned into wind over the antenna (5).
Given that a normal paraglider glide ration is about 1.1 m/s in still air, 4.5m/s sink is really dramatic. You are going down at over four times the normal descent speed. It's potentially a high dangerous situation that needs to be assertively handled.
Here's a little math about my situation at that point. I did the whole calculation below mentally and instinctively in about 20 seconds at the time. The math came later... At 4.5m/s (approx 850ft/min) and 1000ft over the ground, I would have had less than a minute and a half before being on the ground right close to the edge of the plateau. The entire glide out to the valley of approx 2000ft would have been taken less than three minutes.
Flying at a forward speed of 23km/h (38km/hr trim speed minus 15km/hr headwind), I would have needed nearly 12 minutes to reach safe landing fields in the valley. At that sink rate however, I would have only been able to fly for 6 minutes, meaning a slope landing someone down in scrub covered ridgetops being a real possibility.
There would have been a high probability that once over the edge of the plateau, I could have ridge soared north again in the east wind. However, this assumption was pretty questionnable given the massive sink on the plateau. At Elsinore, once the west sea breeze rolls like a wave over the plateau, and then pours off the 2000ft drop to Lake Elsinore below, ridge soaring becomes almost impossible. I had no idea when this would actually occur, but at the time, it did seem that the sink I was experiencing might already have been the sea breeze rolling in a shutting everything down.