My best flight since 2011, and great racing with friends
This was a great day flying, some special accomplishments for me too. It was my best flight since my last personal best in 2011. We had fifteen pilots fly the task, 10 got to goal on a 51km task, which is big for the SoCalXC League.
The day didn't look great to start with, very hazy inversion, with the mountains over the other side of Riverside barely visible.
I initially struggled to even get above launch, needing nearly forty minutes to find good enough thermals to climb out to 1000ft over launch, which seemed to be where the inversion was. 1000ft over is my benchmark for going pretty much anywhere at Marshall.
The start was a Start Out/Exit In cylinder. Being not that experienced at comps, I'm still always a little confused by these cylinders. A Start Out/Exit In start cylinder is where you must be outside the start cylinder, enter into it, and have at least one GPS tracklog point inside the cylinder to prove validate your start. Of course, you can't see where it is except for on your GPS, so there is quite and art to timing your speed, height, direction, wind drift to arrive at the start line just when the start opens.
US Paragliding Team member Arnold Frankenburger showed his superior competition knowledge by placing himself upwind of the start cylinder. This allowed him to turn downwind, tag the circle closest to the path to the first turnpoint, and start the race. Meanwhile I slogged into the wind a few minutes behind from within the start circle, so had to exit, come back in, then fly out again towards the first turnpoint.
The course started with the usual back and forth around launch to give everyone some easier legs and see how the day was going to develop.
After grovelling at the start, and then two easy turnpoints at Region and Towers, I found myself grovelling again, having missed the thermal that the first group of pilots used to get high enough to make the first challenging crossing to the BillBoard turnpoint on the Crestline ridge. Luckily I found a decent thermal further down the ridge to take me up to to the magic 1000ft over launch height and cross to Crestline on the first big valley transition. The valley tends to collect a lot of wind, which then pushes it up the steep slopes towards Crestline, which is a 4500 ft ridge. The problem is that the wind speed can increase as it goes over the crest, making it very windy or turbulent at the top of the ridge.
Several pilots didn't make it out of these early challenges, and ended up landing after less than 40 minutes flying.
Then we had a huge 35km leg all the way down the mountain range to Yucaipa. I'd only ever flown a third of that distance down these mountains before. The good thing was we didn't have to come back, and would have the wind pushing us partially downwind all the way.
Thanks to a nice thermal at Towers, I climbed to the highest point of the day, at around 6000ft. That's not really high for this site, but certainly enough to go cross country.
Then it was a matter of gliding 3-4 km to the next mountain, find the next thermal trigger, glide in deeper to the next mountain, find another thermal. We had to navigate a little around the 'no landing' areas on the Indian reservation, where apparently they call the Sheriff if you land. Not sure exactly what the Sheriff does with you!
I had some somewhat nerve racking moments pushing out towards civilization from deeper in the dry scrubby hills after Mt McKinley, sort of drifting along ridge tops waiting for something to pop off. At one point I saw Joe Popper low down below scratching around looking for lift. When you worried yourself it's always a little encouraging to know that someone is worse off!
Climbing out with Joe Popper (lower track)
Joe ended up climbing out on the same thermal I did a few minutes later, but he had the good sense to keep with the thermal another 1200ft, and then fly right over Aaron Price and me as we got stuck near the big dam after the next glide. You can see the dam at the right of the image above.
The wind was strong at the dam, and Aaron and I were both turning back pushing back down the ridge contemplating safe landing areas in between a headwind, gusty cliffs, bridge, power lines, scratchy scrub, dry river boulders and roads, when a thermal kicked off from the last cliff on the ridge.
It was best thermal of the day, smooth and big and even. Aaron and I took a while to get our turns synced in and then we had that magical nirvana of paragliding experiences, where you turn effortlessly around each other in perfect synchronization, in a big fat thermal in warm summer air.
Climbing out from near the dam with Aaron Price
Mine is the colored tracklog, Aaron in solid red.
There were a lot of smiles all round as Joe landed a couple of minutes later, and we rounded up the seven other pilots from various spots around the Yucaipa valley.
Epic racing, and fabulous fun flying with friends!
Getting to Goal in Yucaipa