We've had a north easterly flow for the last couple of days. This has brought cool moist air from the coast into the Mackenzie basin giving us a cool morning with low cloud that takes a while to warm. The soaring conditions start later, mostly early afternoon instead of late morning.
Yesterday most people managed 250 - 300km in nice thermal conditions, but not very high. Tricky but rewarding flying.
We've been having less than fantastic weather this week. Nasty easterly flows that make life difficult. Some good flying earlier, but by 'good' I mean achieving reasonable cross country flights on days that didn't look great but produced a window of opportunity for soaring. More a case of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear than actually being a nice soaring day.
Weak ridge, disorganised wave, messed up thermals. Good enough to get around, but hard to predict what was going to work. A classic Omarama soaring day.
The fresh snow made the run down the Hawkdun range spectacular. The weak lift made it stressful.
Up in the wave the upper winds were around 70 knots, so once you climbed above the clouds it got hard to go anywhere except downwind. It was cold too, -15 at 15,000ft.
Our weather has been sourcing air from the south. Very cool westerly flow over the South Island today. We even got rain and snow last night. The tops of the hills got a light dusting of snow from around 4,000ft.
The westerly was strong and moist. We flew up and down the wave in winds over 70 knots in places.
Today was gloomy and uninspiring. There was uncertaincy about which end to launch from because the wind on the ground wasn't easy to predict. We had to move the grid to the other end of the airfield before launch. It went fairly quickly, which is unusual.
On the grid I closed my oxygen bottle because I thought the task was too short to bother getting high. As we got closer to launch I noticed a rotor cloud forming over the end of the airfield, so I changed my mind, got out of the glider and opened the oxygen bottle. I'd told Alex, one of the young pilots, that I'd closed my bottle earlier so I went over and helped him get his bottle open too.
Sure enough, a day that had looked marginal was now a pumping wave day and we ripped around the short task. The wave was lined up over the turnpoints and along the task route. You couldn't have set that up deliberately. I flew the whole task in the wave and only turned in the first climb, the rest was done without circling. Fastest speed was nearly 160kph for the 170km task. The contest leader messed up and now the top group are all in with a chance if we get a task tomorrow.
Philip Plane
philip@omarama.net