Friday, November 09, 2012

Rainbow State

Soundings yesterday morning recorded a high weak inversion, which allowed our clouds to grow taller than normal and collect extra moisture. We saw a lot of that moisture yesterday, many times in the form of rainbows. Typically when we see rainbows while we're flying, it's a cause for concern: it means we're likely to get wet very soon. During yesterday's flight with Jason, I saw three or four separate rainbows bearing down on us below some very tall clouds, and I was sure we were destined for a drenching. But somehow we managed to just barely dodge all of them and stay dry.



We flew a super fun rainbow chronic flight to Kualoa and Punaluu and back to Kahana, possibly his last flight before leaving Monday to move back to Alaska, land of the midnight sun. Not sure if they have rainbows there, but this flight will definitely be one for Jason to remember us by. At the end of the day I learned an important lesson. You can dodge squalls all day long, but you can't escape your karma: if your number is up, you're getting wet. My camelbak is broken right now, so I'm flying with a bottle of water, and I forgot to take it out of my harness as I was folding up at the LZ. My harness, wing and backpack happily absorbed a liter of water before I realized the lid had popped off. Sigh.

Despite getting soaked after landing, I am stoked with the footage I got on this last flight with Jason. I managed to shoot clips of Jason during every portion of the flight, with some really nice close-ups, and I had enough shots of him to allow me to completely remove any distracting first person references from the film, except for a cameo of my feet at the end...

As I drove into town to pick up the kids I was treated to another rainbow show: four or five more rainbows, and some of them were double!

Roll call: me, Jason, Thom, Woody, Alison, Allegra, Bay Area Erik, Larry, Joey, Johnimo, Louis, Sylvain, Aurelia, Berndt, and possibly others. Thanks to Jason for the refreshments. Hope you find yourself in the rainbow state again very soon!

3 comments:

Ka'a'awa Larry said...

Nice flight and video.
It's been great meeting and flying with you, Jason. My bet is that we'll see you soon and often.
Aloha!

Thom said...

Wow, that was one of your best video's Alex.

Hopefully Jason got to watch it.

Thanks for the evening wine read.

Geronimo John said...

The best I have ever seen. Well done Alex!