Wednesday, March 06, 2013

Makapu'u Throwdown

As I came past Sandy Beach park on my way to fly Makapu'u this afternoon was wondering if I'd made the right choice. The wind seemed brisk and in the distance I saw Fire Dave throwing down a SAT. Caught up with Maui Doug near the LZ and we watched Jorge get off Juice in his acro wing too. Maui packed up his small wing and we hiked from the LZ toward launch. Met up with Nova at the trail, where he got dropped off by Jinju. We all hiked up, then Doug launched first on his small Aspen, followed by Nova on his Thriller, then me on my Venus 2. Thought it was going to be a 'low in the bowl' flight at first with all those acro wings in the air putting on an entertaining display (that's how I came up with the title, their play reminded me of a hoedown, they were all showing off their stuff).

Conditions ended up being pretty nice. Fire Dave and Jorge landed after a bit, then hiked back up with their XC wings and headed off down range. I opted to stay local, cloud base was looking kind of low in the distance. 5-0 Mike called up on radio and told him it was looking good as I prepared to launch, he was up on launch not much later. Maui Doug landed his solo and hiked back up with a passenger from British Columbia and they got in a dose of skyalis. Divot Steve and Scrappy showed up for some air time too. Had a nice mellow afternoon flight. Once we landed 5-0 got a call from Fire Dave and Jorge, they made it out near Kualoa. Sounded like a good portion of their trip had been in some showers. Nice one! Also heard Gaza, Thom and Ike on radio out at Kahana, but didn't get any replies when I tried to radio them. Sure have enjoyed flying three out of the last four days.
My pics.
Didn't catch any of the acro boys in the act.

2 comments:

Alex said...

Thanks for the writeup Jim! Sounds like you guys had a fun day out there. I would love to see Dave, Jorge and Nova showing off their stuff at the same time!

Thom said...

Great to see you at the pen again Jim and for a guy that 'works' all day to travel that far to get flight 3 of the 4 days is dedication or just a real bad addiction.....I am going with the second.

Thanks for the re-cap, I heard you once and tried to reply but we were getting some funky cloudes at KNA too.

JJ Jameson