Sometimes we have to be reminded how lucky we are to be able to romp around without any significant airspace restrictions.
Here's a graphic showing a whole season of flying on New Zealand's North Island. The two gliding centers, Taupo and Matamata, are easily identifiable.
It's not easy being a newsletter editor when you're out of town on a spectacular soaring day and nobody writes their story. All of the following is scraped from the OLC, a few emails, and the forum.
On Friday, technically a Slacker Day, there were eight flights posted, for a total of 2979 kilometers. Everybody ran up to Mount Washington (probably together), and either came home directly (NT, DC, 2C) or via an excursion over to the Green Mountains JR, T8, AG). Tim (BU) did the run twice, for 516 kilometers. David (505) racked up 69 kilometers in the local area in the 1-26.
That was a lot of good flying, and congratulations to everyone.
But if you think that was special, consider this: Tim (BU), Evan (T8), and Greg (JR) flew all the way across the Champlain valley into New York on Sunday. This has never been done before.
The next day Evan wrote:
I don't know what's more amazing, the flight or the fact that Evan wrote about it.Yesterday, Tim, Greg and I kicked over the left side of the Post Mills sandbox, crossed the Lake Champlain valley and flew to the highest point in New York State.
One of the reasons for trying this on Sunday was that the weather forecast seemed to indicate less likelihood of overdevelopment on the Adirondacks. Another is that the wind direction (SW) would keep us out of the wind shadow of the big part of Lake Champlain.
The second bit worked as designed. The first not so much. It OD’d on us hard, but we managed to find the climbs we needed to make it back. Patience and teamwork were required. Glider performance helps too!
Last night I emailed Adirondack Soaring to tell them we’d planted our flag on Mount Marcy and claimed it for the republic of Post Mills.
I added “next time we’ll try to bring better weather.”
