Good Friday, Awesome Saturday

For over 20 years, I worked as a consultant, which meant that I had lots of flexibility in my schedule and could easily arrange to take days off to do things like hang gliding. Last spring, though, I started a regular full-time job (initially as a contractor, but I recently switched over to being on salary). It’s been good for my bank account, but my free time is a little more constrained. There is a holiday schedule, though, and the company was closed the Friday before Easter. I asked around if anybody else was interested in flying, and John B was, plus Keith B said he’d be going down to Ellenville. Ellenville was the best bet, since being further south, it would already be mostly clear of snow (the Trail probably still had snow on launch, and Ascutney would not be open for many weeks yet).

John and I rendezvoused south of Worcester and headed for New York. The sky was clear when we started driving, but cumulus clouds started popping up, which we found encouraging, until they got thicker and thicker and started to really fill the sky. In addition, the wind, which we expected to be NW trending toward W, seemed to be coming from all kinds of strange directions. Not a lot of action when we arrived, but by the time we got signed in and drove up to launch, there were several wings in the air.

It was completely overcast by this point, and one pilot who had already flown and landed said that he had gotten high enough that it was pretty cold. We both launched as soon as we could get ready, and there was enough ridge lift that staying in the air was easy (the wind had straightened out, or maybe what we saw in the valley was simply deceptive). Despite the cloud cover, there was thermal action as well, and I was able to climb to 3200 feet. Still only early spring, and there was still a fair bit of snow in the woods on north-facing slopes.

Because the temperature had been mild on the ground, and I wasn’t expecting to get particularly high, I wore only gloves and left my bar mitts in the car. It wasn’t long before I was regretting that decision, as my fingers started getting quite cold. It was pretty neat to consider that I was flying a hang glider, and getting paid at the same time (due to the holiday). I kept wriggling them, and flew one-handed some of the time, but after about an hour that was getting old, so I headed for the LZ. I flared a little too aggressively and early, and settled down from a few feet up. (It seemed fine at the time, but I actually tweaked my right ankle a bit, which became a bit of a problem after I did a 16 mile run two days later.) It was one of those flights where the first few minutes after landing are spent in agony as warmth trickles back into the fingers (maybe that’s why I didn’t notice my ankle).

There was a decent crowd flying, considering it was a weekday, and after John retrieved his car from launch, we headed off to join some other pilots at a local restaurant for dinner (and Tony, proprietor of the launch and LZ, came along as well). As we were heading out, Voighter was heard to say, “The forecast for tomorrow looks like it could be epic, but don’t talk it up too much on the internet, because it could get really crowded.
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John and I split a motel room with Keith for the night, and we were able to have a leisurely breakfast while others were making the long drive (a number of PG pilots came down from New England, as well as Todd K from Vermont and Jeff C from near where I live). Tom L had been thinking about it, but also worked really hard at talking himself out of it. Apparently as he was checking his messages in bed Friday night, he mentioned to his drowsy wife that I said I’d be flying with bar mitts on Saturday. In the morning, she asked what he had told her the night before, and he repeated that J-J said he was going to fly with bar mitts. “Oh”, she replied, “I thought you said J-J was going to a flying Bar Mitzvah”. In any case, Tom used this hint of chilly conditions as part of his excuse to stay home. Meanwhile, the sky was looking fantastic at Ellenville, and John was antsy to get going, so he and I drove up while Jeff and Todd signed in, leaving them to catch a ride up with Keith. We set up in a hurry, but then nobody was launching, although it wasn’t clear why.

Normally the PGs launch early, but they were all just standing around. Keith is another one you can count on to go as soon as it looks good, and when he moved to launch, I was ready to go right after him. Off he went…. and down he went! Solid sink all the way to the LZ, so bad that he said later that he wasn’t even sure he was going to make it, and the PG who launched right after him got about the same. Dang! Although it was true that the sun hadn’t really swung around far enough to heat the NW-facing slope, the clouds looked fantastic. Tom called to ask how things were going, and I told him that the thermometer on my vario was claiming that it was above 60F in the setup area (a little hard to believe, but it was certainly over 50F). Todd drove down to grab Keith for a second try, and we waited a bit longer. When John G launched his PG and shot up toward the sky, that was all I needed to see, and I moved up to take my turn. It didn’t take much time at all to find air that was going up, and I started corkscrewing my way toward the clouds.

The highest I had ever managed to get in the past was a hair under 7000 feet (once at the Trail, and another time at Ascutney) so I was somewhat excited when I saw my altitude closing in on that number. It didn’t stop, either, and went right on up to almost 8000. I fiddled around with my camera and dropped below 6000, then started climbing again until I was somewhere above 8600. At that point I noticed that there was frost building up on my helmet chinguard (the thermometer was reading 27F, I think). Other pilots commented that up at that altitude, the air was filled with sparkling ice crystals. I also noticed at this point that the ground was getting a little hard to see, things were getting fuzzy. Whoops! Time to head for the edge of the cloud and get out from under it.

My hands were getting a little chilled despite the gloves and bar mitts, so I pulled out a packet of teabag hand warmers and stuffed them into the backs of my gloves. Doing that dropped me down to 5000 feet, and I made another trip up to 8000, then decided that I didn’t need to spend all my time shivering to have fun, and I headed north, using up some altitude to cover some distance. Just to the north side of town and back, but that got me down to nearly 3000. There weren’t all that many wings in the air, and I think it was around this time that I watched four or five gliders launch and sled down to the LZ like they were playing follow-the-leader. Weird. It seemed like this was a 50-50 day, where you either sank out or skyed out. I briefly talked on the radio with Todd, who was one of the former, wondering whether Keith had launched again. In any case, I headed up once more.

By this time, I was a wimp and my arms were getting tired. I decided to head toward the LZ and do some things that would waste altitude. Specifically, I just headed upwind, and pulled in to fly fast and lower my efficiency. There was no getting down over the LZ, though, nothing but lift there. It was entertaining to be pulled in that far, flying into the wind, and to be at 7000 feet and still climbing. I managed to fly nearly three miles NW of launch, well out into the forest on the far side of Ellenville. It was cool to see the site from that perspective. Eventually I decided that I needed to land, because I had a lot to do ahead of me. I hadn’t seen John’s glider in a while, which meant that he had probably been successful in heading out XC, and I was going to need to pick him up somewhere. So I started actively looking for sink.

I explored in a few more directions, and the one that brought me success was SW, which got me into a blue hole where I could finally get down. Dropping to below 5000 feet, I headed back toward the LZ where I found lift again, but I was able to evade it. Landing had me concerned. Because I kept finding unexpected lift, I was worried that it might happen on final and cause me to overshoot. I flew a normal pattern, but I wasn’t really dropping like I hoped, and when I was on my base leg, I was too high. The surface wind was kind of north, so at this point I was deep over the pumpkin patch, and had to start doing S-turns to lose altitude. But that wasn’t working, I was kind of just maintaining. After a half-dozen turns, I was finally low enough to go on final, but of course I misjudged and came up about 75 feet short, landing in the weeds. Doh! At least it was early enough the year that the seasonal scrub hadn’t grown up yet, and I was less than a wingspan from the trail that runs through there. I carried my wing across the LZ to the fence, climbed out of my harness, and just flopped down on my back on the grass. Woo!

After packing up, I started looking around for a ride up top to get John’s car. My friend Six was heading that way, and we actually piled so many people into his Honda CRV that it bottomed out when we got to the road in to launch. No matter, easy enough to get out and walk from there. It was a funny thing, while I was bouncing around at cloudbase, I kept looking down and seeing a dozen or more gliders set up, and I couldn’t figure out why they weren’t all rushing to get into the air. When I reached the parking lot, there were none left on the ground, but still a number in the air. It’s possible that launch conditions got funny, and people were worried about having trouble, or about sinking out. But I think the real issue was that some fraction of the people who showed up were not interested in 1400+ fpm lift going up to above 8000 feet. That can be intimidating stuff. They just like boating around in smooth evening air, and that’s what they eventually got.

I drove back down to the LZ just after Jeff landed, with about 5 hours of airtime. I was so tired that I asked somebody for help to load my glider onto the roof rack. I had gotten a text message from John telling me where he was, and I replied that it would be a little after 9 PM before I could get to him. He had flown about 50 miles, crossed the Hudson, and was in Connecticut, pretty close to Brace (though he didn’t realize it). He landed in a farm field, packed up, and walked about 3.5 miles to Lakeville, where he found a pub and had eaten dinner and was relaxing with a pint of beer when I arrived. Sweet! Timo, plus several PG pilots, had nice XC flights as well.

It was quite an experience, at least 9 Pfams on the epicness scale. There were times when I was climbing faster than I could run. I don’t mean faster than I can climb stairs, I mean 16 mph vertically, faster than I can run on the level. There have been numerous times when I’ve been flying and seen a tiny wing, quite a way from launch and waaaaaaay up there. This was a day when I got to be that guy.

Friday, flights: 1, airtime: 1:05
Saturday, flights: 1, airtime: 2:43

Hey, where’s the beach?!

Over three months since I last flew, and I passed up a chance to head down to Ellenville a week ago, in part because the other pilots who live near me were being weenies, but I could have gone on my own, and I didn’t, so I guess I was a weenie, too. (And I hear the day turned out pretty good down there.) So when I posted that I was thinking about going down to Wellfleet, and one of my buddies said, “Nah, it might be too light, too long a drive to take a chance…”, that cemented my decision and I got up before 4 AM to face:

Pitch darkness (the first day of Daylight Saving Time), 20 F temperature, and a 2 hour 40 minute drive to the Cape. Doesn’t that picture just look like the start of an inviting beach day?

The trick was to get there early enough to launch as soon as possible after dawn, because high tide was at 11:20 AM, and it was going to be the second-highest tide of the month. In addition, the wind looked like it would start out pretty good, but back off as the morning went on. Ross, Keith, and Timo were already starting to set up when I arrived, and I got right to it as well. The breeze was okay, certainly not overly strong, and although it was only 90 minutes after low tide, the beach was already quite narrow. We had a couple of very serious winter storms here in the past month, and the waves were pretty hungry for beach sand. The slope in front of launch had been undercut and slumped to the angle of repose (often referred to as “vertical” by people looking at it, but actually somewhere between 30 and 45 degrees — appearances can be deceptive!), and the level of the beach itself had been scoured several feet lower than usual. While we were getting ready, several PG pilots arrived, plus fellow HG pilots Ilya, Krassi, Dave P, and biwingual Jon A who had brought his Falcon.

Keith is usually the first to launch, and this was no exception. It looked like he might be getting bumped around a bit, but he headed off to the north — the opinion was that landing up at Newcomb Hollow, where the beach is wider and the climb to the parking lot shorter, was an especially good idea given the conditions. I wired Timo off a few minutes later, and he followed Keith, then returned a bit later, hollering down something that we couldn’t quite make out, but it sounded like “Keith landed OK”. Landed? Surely not so soon?

No time like the present, so I climbed into my harness, went through all of my checks, and Ross and Dave walked me out to launch. Light enough that it was easy to control the wing, just enough that I was able to float it up off my shoulders. In retrospect I suppose I should have taken that as a clue and waited for it to get a little stronger. Off I went, made a turn to the left, caught the lift and soared up over the top of the ridge… no, wait, I didn’t, oops, I’m a little low out front, gotta get up, ummm…. that’s not working, oh, look, I’m on my way to a landing, well, let’s at least do it right!

And so I was on the beach, and a couple of minutes later I watched Ilya and Jon launch and soar on by to the north. But Ilya came back right away, and set his glider down right in front of launch. I was already breaking down as fast as I could, and it turned out that he had come back because when he got a look up the beach… he couldn’t see any beach! Just waves lapping up against the toe of the slope. At this point it wasn’t even yet 8 AM, and the tide would still be coming in for another 3 1/2 hours! As soon as I got everything packed up, I walked up the beach with my harness and battens to see if I could climb the crumbling slope with them. It wasn’t easy, like crawling up a down escalator, but I made it. It didn’t seem feasible to do the same with my glider, and I was afraid I’d have to carry it two miles north to Newcomb in order to get it off the beach. But Ilya had just finished packing his lightweight Falcon, so we decided to try and carry it up together. That was a struggle, but we managed to get it far enough up to slide it sideways onto a part of the slope that hadn’t collapsed yet, and the other pilots were able to grab it. Emboldened, we fetched my wing and repeated the trick, then Ilya got his harness and we were done. Here’s what the slope in front of launch looked like:

Ross, Krassi, and Dave were sufficiently unimpressed by the prospects that they started breaking down. Meanwhile, the other hang gliders were nowhere to be seen. John G, who was flying his PG, landed and reported that they were on the ground up north. I got in the car to retrieve them, and hadn’t gone very far before I found Keith, who had walked almost the whole way back. We got Keith’s truck, because it has a bigger rack, and drove up to Newcomb Hollow. Turned out that Keith had sunk out a little before reaching Newcomb, Timo had flown up there and landed shortly after telling us that Keith was on the ground, and Jon had decked it at Doane’s Bog Pond, and in the process of carrying his stuff up to Newcomb, got his feet wet because the waves were coming all the way up.

So, the day was over. For the HGs, at least. The PGs were having a fine time in the light conditions (light for us, not so light for them!), and they didn’t mind the lack of beach so much. Ross and I decided to take a look at the conditions up and down the shore a bit. It turns out there’s really nowhere to get onto the beach in a civilized manner at this point.

At Newcomb Hollow, we have this helpful bit of advice for motorists:

Yeah, no shit. Here’s what it looks like from the other direction:

Looking south from Newcomb Hollow, there’s not much beach:

Looking north, at what is normally a major gap, there’s now enough of a shelf that it might be soarable the whole way across in the right wind conditions (click for larger version):

Down at Marconi Beach, the walkway is blocked off (I climbed over the barrier) because the stairs are gone, and the platform at the top has been completely undermined and is hanging out over space (it may not look like it in this picture, but it’s a long way down…):

There are also changes on the other side of the Cape, but those changes are not due to the weather. The Seascape Motel, which was for many years a welcoming launch site, was sold last year, and has been demolished:

Although the demolition crew did spare the launch platform, at least so far:

Gotta put a token hang glider picture in here, I guess…

flights: 1, airtime: 48 seconds

2012 in review

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

In some regards 2012 was the best season in New England in years.  If I’m not mistaken, it was the first time since 2007 that anyone made it from Ascutney to the beach (Randy B and Jeff B on separate days).  There were also other admirable XC flights, including my modest first trip over the back from Ascutney when, despite some klutzy flying, I managed to make it to Morningside.  In addition to my furthest landing from launch, I also bumped up the bar slightly on my longest duration flight ever.  Most of my landings were pretty good.  A substantial crop of new pilots has appeared, moving out from Morningside to West Rutland and beyond.  Unlike last year, when there were almost no flyable days at Wellfleet, we’ve had several already this winter.

On the downside, I got a new job.  Now, this is a good thing from the perspective of my finances, but I have a less flexible schedule now, which seriously hampers my ability to fly on weekdays.  As a result, I went eight weeks in the summer without flying, missing most of July and all of August.  The second half of the year was roughly one flight a month, and most of those sledders.  Only half of my flights this year lasted more than an hour.  All of my flying was in New England this year (well, okay, technically Brace is just over the border in New York, but you park in Connecticut); I didn’t even make to Ellenville.  There weren’t many places where I managed to fly more than once (three flights at Skinner, two each at the Trail, Greylock, and Wellfleet, but each of those included a sledder).

And then there were the accidents.  I was present for three crashes this year, of varying severity and with various outcomes.  The first was a pilot flying too slowly, much too close to the terrain, who ended up crashing on a road and had to be taken from the scene in an ambulance, with his glider destroyed.  I haven’t run into him since, but I’ve heard that he’s eager to get back in the air, although he’s having some lingering problems from his injuries (I don’t know if that’s accurate).  The second was a blown launch, resulting in superficial injuries and minor glider damage.  The pilots on hand were able to get him and the glider out of the tree without outside assistance, and I’ve seen him at a site since (he was flying his paraglider, and said his hang glider was being repaired).  And the third was also a blown launch, no injury to the pilot, no damage to the wing, but we needed help from the fire department to get him down, and he immediately gave up flying and sold his gear (a friend said he has seen someone else flying that wing since).

So, the stats:

Months flown: 10 (not Jan or Aug)
Flying days: 15
Days when I showed up with my gear but didn’t fly: 2
Flights: 15 (8 soaring, 4 extended sledders, 3 sledders)
Sites flown: 9 (Skinner, Mohawk Trail, Hinesburg, Rutland, Greylock, Ascutney, Brace, Burke, Wellfleet)
New sites: 1 (Hinesburg)
Gliders flown: 3 (Falcon 170, Ultrasport 147, Vision Mark IV 17)
Longest flight (time): 4:28:06
Longest flight (XC distance): 15.27 km
Total flight time: 17:28
Total XC distance: 42 km (three 5+ km flights, the rest in tiny bits)
Total path length from GPS: 580 km
Max altitude: 5718 feet (May 20, Greylock)

Soggy Saturday

Jon A and I had considered flying at a small mountain site a week earlier, but when the time came to make a decision, the forecast looked too gusty. He had permission on the home front for one more flying day this year, though, so he was excited about the chance to go to Wellfleet. A post on the message board with the subject “Soggy Saturday” elicited some initial interest from a few newer pilots, who are eager for all the airtime they can get, but when it came time to make a decision, they were put off by the prospect of rain and decided to not make the trip. I had things on my schedule for Friday night that meant I wouldn’t be getting home very early, but I told Jon that I could meet at his house at 5 AM, which was what the wind and tide dictated. I loaded up my car as soon as I got home, and went right to bed.

When my alarm clock went off at 4 AM, I wasn’t very happy.  I did a quick check of the weather on my computer with hope that the forecast had deteriorated, but it still looked good.  Maybe too light.  I felt like it was way too early in the morning to be awake, but I had told Jon that I’d go.  I figured, worst case, I’d go with him, we’d decide that it was too light for hang gliders, he could fly his paraglider, and I’d just be along for the ride and keep him company.  And that’s not so bad.  When I got to his house, I didn’t see any lights on, so I sent him a text message saying I had arrived, then dozed off in the driver’s seat of my car.  After some amount of time, I heard a knock on the window – Jon had also fallen back to sleep, and my text had woken him up.  We loaded the wings on his truck and headed for the Cape.

Unlike the last time I had driven down with Jon, the trees were not rocking as we got near the site, but we attributed that to the fact that they now had no leaves.  A check with our wind gauges at White Crest Beach showed that it was blowing around 17 mph, with a noticeable cross from the right.  No reason to delay.  I started setting up my Mark IV, while Jon grabbed his PG, figuring that he’d try that first and break out his Falcon later, and try to make it a biwingual day.  There were a few other PGs kiting down on the beach, and he joined them as I set up alone – there were no other HGs there.  About the time I was ready, Jon benched his way up the hill far enough to take flight, and pretty soon he was soaring above launch.

The wind was light enough that I didn’t need any help carrying my glider over to the gap and getting in position to launch.  I waited a few moments, not because I needed to wait for the wind, I just wanted to take some deep breaths and get my head straight.  It was also right around this time that light rain started – the first I noticed it was when I moved my glider from the spot where I had set it up, and realized that it was the only dry place on the pavement.  Launch went great, and I headed up to Cahoon Hollow before turning south toward Nauset Light, and the section of the beach where the crosswind would be more straight in.  Unfortunately, I was a little overconfident crossing the section of low dunes and houses between launch and Lecount Hollow, and when I got to the taller bluff beyond, I had bled off too much altitude, and was out of the lift band.  Maybe if I had tucked in more aggressively close to the slope I could have hung on, but it was not to be, and I set up for a clean landing.

Still early in the day, though, so there was potential for trying again.  I left the glider set up and carried it back to launch, which was trickier than last time because the wind was lighter, and I also had to back up because it was blowing in the other direction.  On the way, I noticed that the water was teeming with seals (or else there was a group of seals who were fascinated by my glider and were following me).  I tried to take some pictures of them, but the timing was tricky because they were only intermittently popping up from behind waves.  I arrived just in time to watch Jon launch his Falcon… and basically sled right down to the beach.  Well, dang!  Why didn’t that work?  He carried his glider over, and the two of us got them both up the slope to the parking lot and we evaluated the conditions and thought about what to do next.

It was still blowing 14-17, which is normally soarable.  However, it was pretty cross.  If you think about the trigonometry, a 14 mph wind coming in at 45 degrees can be treated like a 10 mph wind that’s coming straight in (the only part that’s useful for creating lift) and a 10 mph wind that’s running parallel to the beach (the part that get affects your groundspeed).  So that 14-17 mph wind was only giving us lift equivalent to 10-12 mph on a straight-in day, which is marginal at best.  We considered the continuing light rain, and took into account that the paragliders were even struggling to stay up, and decided to just pack up and hit the road.  But we had a day at the beach, and we both flew (Jon with both wings), so we considered it a success, especially for December.

And did it continue to rain on the way home.  No, not really.

It snowed.

flights: 1, airtime: 0:08

Birthday treat

If you were born in November and live in New England, you don’t often get a chance to fly on your birthday.  And it had been about 20 months since I had been able to get to the beach on a day when the winds were to my liking, so my beach glider, the venerable Vision Mark IV, had been sitting in its bag for a long time.  I had a lot of things going on during the weekend, but starting several days out I had been eyeing the forecast.  High tide at 2 PM, but the forecast for the morning looked like it might work.  Internet chatter started up, with those who were going to be busy telling the rest of us that we were being overly optimistic, because the predicted wind was too cross from the north.  As far as I was concerned, it didn’t matter – Saturday was my birthday, and I was going to go to the beach whether or not I was going to get a chance to get airborne.

I didn’t take too insane an approach to this.  I just loaded up my car the night before and set the alarm for 5 AM, and headed out the door in the morning for the 2½ hour drive.  I had also sent an email to my friend George, who I’ve known since second grade, and who lives on Cape Cod.  Around the time I was passing near his house, my phone rang, and he asked where I was.  He said he’d meet me at White Crest Beach after he ran a couple of errands, and I told him I’d leave my spare radio on the hood of my car so he could give a holler if I was already in the air.  When I arrived at launch, there were already two gliders in the air and a couple more setting up in the parking lot.  I took a quick look at the streamers on launch and saw that it was in fact pretty cross, but the velocity felt good, so I started setting up right away.  Art showed up a couple of minutes later; he, PK, and Russ K had all driven down from Vermont the night before.  They tried setting up across the street in what would normally be the lee of the little building, but the wind was so cross that it didn’t work, so Russ joined me in my unconventional spot on the west side of the north end of the east parking lot.

When I was halfway through setting up, Keith launched, and had no trouble getting up and disappearing to the north.  As soon as I could get everything together, I turned my wing around and crab-walked my way toward launch.  There was another pilot ready, and as soon as he was in the air, the wire crew came over and helped me over the sand berm at the edge of the pavement (looked like somebody maybe plowed the sand off of the parking lot after Hurricane Sandy passed by).  The breeze was very comfortable, so I dismissed the nose wire, picked up the glider, and let it fly off my shoulders.  It was very easy to control in a basically neutral lift position, so I cleared the side wires, pulled in a bit to get the wing moving forward, and strolled off into the air.

The reality of the crosswind became very evident as soon as I launched.  I was necessarily headed north, but I wasn’t particularly making any progress.  It was about the slowest going I’ve ever experienced, though staying up didn’t seem to be a problem.  I slowly crawled past Cahoon Hollow and up to Doane’s Bog Pond, where I decided that it wasn’t even clear that I’d be able to jump that small gap (although others were up beyond it).  Rather than sink out so soon, I turned around, and…

Whoa!  Hold onto your hat, pal!

I knew what to expect, and the downwind definitely delivered.  The inching along had been replaced by a screaming tailwind run.  I made sure to take precautions, in particular, to  pull in immediately after turning downwind to make sure I had enough maneuvering airspeed (because groundspeed can be deceiving), and likewise just before making a turn back upwind.  Over the course of an hour and a half, my groundspeed as tracked by my GPS looked like this:

On my second trip north, a call came on the radio from George, who was at launch.  I flew back and waved to him, and he took some pictures of me flying.  Here he is, flanked by my shadow and a cruiser containing a police officer who was reportedly also having fun taking pictures of the gliders.  In the back is George’s white pickup, and my “new” car, which I got back in the summer, but hadn’t taken to a flying site prior to this.

Because of the crosswind, crossing the gaps in the bluff was not easy.  I got across Doane’s Bog Pond once, but I also saw two pilots on the beach who had sunk out there.  After almost an hour and a half, I decided to get a little adventurous.  I knew there was no chance of crossing the gap at Newcomb Hollow, so I instead ventured a little bit south of launch, despite the fact that the coast curves around and the wind would be even more cross the further I went in that direction.  I turned around at Marconi Station and started fighting my way back upwind, but the lift was harder to come by, and it occurred to me that I was getting too low and was going to be on the ground soon.  I reached for the cord to unzip my harness, and couldn’t find it.  That’s never happened to me before.  I normally deal with unzipping when I’m still hundreds of feet off the ground, and have time to fiddle with it, but in this case I had only seconds.  I grabbed the zipper pull itself and got partway unzipped, then I was able to spread my knees and get it down far enough to get my feet out, but by then I was too short on time to be able to rock upright, so I just kept on flying and did a reasonably graceful belly landing (not too difficult with that strong headwind).

At that point I could have just packed up the glider and carried it up to the parking lot at Cahoon Hollow, then walked back to get my car, but I found that the wind was the ideal speed and direction to walk with a glider — it was up off my shoulders, and even taking some of my weight via the harness, while I flew it from the control bar and walked along.  I was having so much fun that I decided to walk it the whole mile back to launch.  George came down to the beach, met me partway, and walked back with me, which gave us a chance to chat and catch up.

Although I try to take pictures when I go flying, I don’t have all that many pictures of myself in the air, and in particular not many with my beach glider.  My friend ARt was flying with a camera on his keel, and sent me this great shot of me on my 51st birthday.

flights: 1, airtime: 1:26

In advance of Sandy

The end of October has long been a big time for flying on Cape Cod.  There’s an annual fly-in at the Seascape Motel, where pilots stay for a week or so, flying from the back lawn of the motel on southwest days, or driving to the ocean side to fly Wellfleet on easterly days.  I’ve stayed at the Seascape only once, shortly before I started this blog, and although the wind direction was good, it was too strong for this novice pilot on a Falcon.  (And there was the detail that I had left my harness bag sitting on the living room floor at home…)  This year was no exception, there were quite a few pilots staying on the Cape.   On Saturday, reports were that conditions were light, but a few HG pilots (and more PG pilots) managed to so some soaring.  The forecast looked favorable for Sunday morning, and Jon sent a text message asking if I’d be interested in carpooling down.  I had some things going on Saturday which meant that I wouldn’t be able to leave until morning, and it looked like a day when an early start was going to be essential, as the winds were supposed to be strong and building all day, plus a tall tide would be coming in.  This was largely due to the approach of Hurricane Sandy.  Good conditions for flying Wellfleet often precede storms, and this one was due to arrive at full moon, which meant that the already wide tide swing would be increased by a storm surge.  There wouldn’t be much beach to land on by midday, so being ready to launch at dawn was the plan.

I was only able to get about two hours of sleep Saturday night before I had to leave to drive to Jon’s house, and I wasn’t a very helpful traveling companion, sleeping in the passenger’s seat most of the way down.  Jon woke me up about a mile before we got to White Crest Beach, and although it was still dark out, I could see the trees really whipping around.  We got out of the car and got sandblasted walking across the parking lot to the small huddle of pilots who were standing around and not setting up their gliders.  Somebody broke out a wind gauge and we saw that it was blowing about 25, gusting to 35.  Too many Beauforts for my taste.  As dawn neared, more and more cars pulled in; at one point I counted 25 gliders on roof racks, and a few more arrived after that.

Well, not the first time I’ve gone down to the Cape and not flown.  We all chatted about the conditions, and as the sky started to brighten, I walked down to the beach with some H2s to look at the condition of the sand shelf, to see what the ground-level breeze was like, and to discuss the landmarks and landing options of the site.  Despite the gale that was blowing a few pilots did start putting their wings together.  Keith B was the first one ready (not surprising), and we had six or seven people holding onto the wires of his Sport 2 155 (and he’s not a small guy).  As he took to the air, I watched him getting buffeted around and was still in no hurry to follow him, especially since I’m a lot lighter and my Mark IV has an additional 15 sq ft of sail.  It was a little surprising when the next one up was Jimmy D.  He’s not much heavier than I am (or maybe lighter), and had brought a Falcon 195.  A big single-surface wing didn’t seem like a great choice to me, but with adequate skill, a lot of surprising things can be accomplished.  He immediately started making passes over launch, then some touch-and-goes, and after not too long, he toplanded.  Had enough?  No, he just wanted to make sure that his buddies had help getting launched.  We pointed out that there were a couple of dozen available wire crew people standing around, and he took off again.

I’d estimate that eventually about half of the pilots flew.  Some of the newer ones wisely decided to stay on the ground, as did some of the more experienced ones, but all indications were that those who did fly found the conditions to be fine.  The lesson to take away from this is that in this kind of circumstance, you might as well go ahead and set up.  Worst case, you just pack the glider away again.  The wind did abate somewhat from the strong conditions at dawn (I think I’ve seen this happen before), even though it did match the forecast of steadily strengthening from that point as the day went on.  Had I been set up, I think I would have decided that it was manageable and I would have flown, but by the time that became the case, I had waited too long.  I also hadn’t really gotten enough sleep the night before, so flying would have been a questionable move, and I was also not that excited by the rain showers that kept popping up (we got some fairly steady rain on the drive home, but I’m not sure if that happened at the beach).

After a couple of hours of standing around and talking, interspersed with occasionally helping a pilot launch, Jon and I decided to hit the road.  On the way out, we drove north along the coast, taking a tour of the notable spots including the Beachcomber restaurant at Cahoon Hollow and the “gaps” at Newcomb Hollow and Ballston Beach, before turning around and heading home.

Hurricane Sandy did arrive the following day, with enough vigor that my place of work in central Massachusetts closed down early, and NYC and New Jersey were hit very hard, though I don’t know how the Cape fared.  The slope up from White Crest Beach to  the parking lot was in pretty good shape before the storm, but there may be a sand cliff again in the aftermath.  Of worse news for pilots is the fact that, after several years where it was anticipated, the Seascape has been sold.  I had wondered whether the new proprietor would still let us fly there, but it’s actually getting turned into house lots.  In the past there were several places on that side of the Cape to launch from, but at this point they may all be gone.  I have hopes  that we’ll find a spot that we can use, but that may be a challenge.

Fledglings

The inevitable committee meeting on the launch ramp.

The email lists were full of comments about how conditions looked favorable for West Rutland, particularly from some new H2s hoping to get first (or at least among their first) mountain flights. I had the day free, and decided to give it a try myself. My original plan was to just drive up on my own, but a call came in the morning from Jeff C and John B, offering to carpool, so I met them in Manchester NH and we headed up together. There were some traffic delays, so we arrived a bit later than we had hoped, and the first loads of gliders had already headed up the mountain. Jeff’s car is not the wild and woolly 4WD sort of vehicle than can negotiate the climb to launch, so we had to wait for someone to give us a ride. There were already a couple of wings in the LZ when we arrived, new pilots who had launched for early sledders, and a couple more flew while we waited. A couple of trucks drove down, and were able to load our wings onto one and get a ride in another. PK turned up in the nick of time and also came up with us.

Everything looked favorable as we rigged our gliders, and PK, who has the most experienced eye for the place, hurried right up and got the first launch. He claimed that he had places to go and might just take a short flight down before we even got a chance to launch, but he turned immediately after leaving the ramp and corkscrewed his way up to the sky. That was a good enough sign for the rest of us.

A couple of the H2s launched while we finished preflighting, and one was on the ramp just as Jeff and I were ready. He seemed to be intimidated by what the wind was doing, and decided to back off. And so did the wind. I wasn’t excited by what I was seeing, and told Jeff that he was welcome to go ahead of me if he wanted. A clean launch for him, then… not so much climbing. He hunted around for lift, and I decided to stay put where I was until things looked more favorable. After maybe 10 minutes, somebody reported that Jeff was climbing out in the valley, and the other pilots in the air seemed to be doing a little better as well, so I decided to take my turn.

The breeze had picked up to a much more encouraging level, and I found a good moment and had what started as a fine launch. When I was most of the way down the ramp, though, I got hit with a sudden gust from in front that yanked my wing into the air, and me along with it — I almost had trouble hanging on, and figured I must have given the people standing on the ramp a heart attack with what probably looked like an aggressive nose pop. No problem, though, I had airspeed, so I turned left and climbed up toward the towers. I returned above launch, but then things started to deteriorate. Lift was not as easy to find as I had hoped, at least not lift that I could exploit, and Jeff was sinking toward the LZ. After hunting around I found a thermal in the valley that I managed to hang onto back up to launch height, but my rusty skills weren’t good enough to stay with it any longer than that. Meanwhile, John launched and fared better.

No sense in putting myself in peril by scratching, so I looked for a climb out over the valley again, and didn’t find one, so I set up a pattern and pulled off a sweet landing right in the middle of the field. If I couldn’t show ‘em how it’s done in terms of staying up, at least I managed a well timed flare. I carried my wing over to the edge of the road and started breaking down as I chatted with Dave B, who had brought some of the H2s. Meanwhile, PK was still up at 5000 feet, John was up in that vicinity as well, and Ed (the other chaperone for the newcomers) launched last and apparent caught some sweet wonder wind. PK eventually landed with frozen hands (he had gloves, but they weren’t enough for that altitude at this tie of year), and the other two came down soon after.

PK on his way in

PK on final

John B displaying admirable flare form

Ed demonstrating an excellent landing

One interesting thing was Alden B’s vintage wing. It’s apparently in good enough shape, and works well enough for this kind of flying!

Quite a crowd, and it was great to fly with the new pilots, all of whom had great flights of varying lengths. My own flight wasn’t very long, though it was certainly longer than the first time I flew at Rutland, and I still remember that time (not so very long ago) and always appreciate any successful flight. Particular appreciation to Bob for coming out on a day when he didn’t fly because he had a cold, to drive people up the mountain and help out as an observer. That’s a dedicated pilot.

flights: 1, airtime: 0:14