Thursday, August 23, 2012

Making Tracks

Yesterday we had a couple of fun visitors flying with us at Kahana. Czech Pete taught his buddy Hardy to fly in Nepal and he's here to fly with us for a few days. Also Canadian Jayson was in town just for the day, and with his usual lucky timing he scored two awesome flights. Alaska Jason also scored a couple of flights.

The morning session was flown by Woody, Jayson, and Jason. I cajoled Thom to come out to join me for some cross country distance during the afternoon session, and we were joined by Lake, visitor Hardy, AKJason, Jayson, Bonnie, and Roland. LarryMac and Roadkill Jeff were there as well.



The clouds were pretty low, maybe two grand, and the lift was on the light side, but the northerly flow made the upwind transitions easier than usual. Especially for the extraterrestrial space ships. Just for fun, I did something I'd tried before but without much luck previously: I activated a live tracking app on my phone to show my route on the Leonardo Live Server as I was flying it. It ate up my battery pretty fast so it didn't last quite the whole flight. I also used my GPS to record my track, but that was already low on battery and I missed the last offshore spiral down before coming back in for a landing at Swanzys. Close enough.



Then I uploaded the track to Leonardo. That's something that many of our cross country hounds have done before (especially Doug Hoffman, Mad Dog, and One Eye), but I've rarely bothered. But it is a pretty cool way to share the details of a flight. Also if we get enough cross country hounds interested we could set up an online league to compete on the basis of our best six flights during a year. A lot of other clubs do that and it seems like a pretty fun idea.

1 comment:

Divot Steve said...

I watched your flight live from my couch. Technology these days is pretty awesome. I think it would be fun to try to set up comp style cylinders at our different ridges to help people go xc and prep for the mainland comps. You are banned from competition though due to illegal doping with that wing ;)