Midsummer Marathon

Our summer season has blessed us with an abundance of sweet cross country conditions, albeit on the humid El Niño side, with clouds a bit lower than we'd prefer on most days. But that hasn't stopped us from flying our heads off in every direction at every opportunity … some of us more than others. Congrats to our most infrequent flyer JK for his record breaking out and back flight on a particularly low cloud day. My flying is never notable for record breaking distance, but I do rack up a lot of cross country airtime, and I take a lot of pictures! Since my last post here, I have flown around 20 of the 30 days before I left for the mainland, and I have only now gone through the 6,100 photos I snapped during that time, to select and process 82 favorites. I hate to say how long that took, but hopefully it was worth it!

And while I’m taking a two week break from flying, on a family and business trip to the east coast, I have time to reflect on the first seven months of the year.

So far this year, I’m honored to be ranked 3rd in the world on Leonardo for cross country airtime, with 218 hours logged over 108 flights, covering 375 miles of cross country distance on our tiny island. And those are only the logged hours: I don't log my flights on mini wings to Leonardo, but I've enjoyed quite a few mini wing hours this year. My best distance this year is 18.7 miles (Makapuu to Hakipuu). My best score is 93.40 (a wide double chronic from Kahana to Malaekahana). But my proudest achievement is always this: out of an estimated 40,000 photos I've taken this year, I've selected and processed almost 800 to upload to Flickr. Not to mention 6 videos.

Counting up the hours this year makes me wonder about my glider, which is already starting to look a bit faded, even though it's only 15 months old. On this wonderful machine, I have logged 425 hours, 218 flights, and 899 miles of XC distance. My second lineset has already seen over 200 hours. That's a lot of hours for one glider. I've never replaced a glider in less than two years, but I have a sneaky feeling that it's time for a new one … které křídlo mám vybrat?