Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Scratching with the Dog

The vog wasn't that bad at Makapuu today, and the clouds were nice and high all morning. Mad Dog and I started to follow Jorge on an epic XC mission, until it became clear that the cloud ceiling had dropped considerably as we were getting into the air.

Jorge persevered downrange, but Mad Dog and I were happy to just work the light broken thermals under the low cloudbase over Waimanalo. Jorge finally turned back as well after getting parked on full speed bar inside a cloud in the strong flow in the venturi between Greenwalls and the Pali.

Later on, Jetflap, Maui Doug, Swiss Simon, Nightshift, Reaper, Chicago Tim and the Telluride boys showed up for the late session. Thom and his family stopped by the lookout to see if Cactus was working, but then Jeff kindly landed up there to check it out and reported that it was too strong.

My four hours were up and I had to leave to join my family at the downtown Cinco de Mayo street party, but I'm guessing the flying and partying at Makapuu lasted late into the evening hours. For all I know they're still there now...

1 comment:

Thom said...

After you had to leave the flying continued, Nightshift actually launched in daylight, Reaper again and Scrappy showed up and needed some ballast. I hooked in with him at Manics and we made a couple fruitless passes. We had a free landing at the beach and headed for the LZ to help empty coolers. The TAF finally all got up when RT showed up with their wings. Coolers were drying up when Donna called and offered all of us some Margarita's which cleared the LZ.