January 3 - Winter Soaring at the Pulpit

One of the bad things about having our main 3 sites all face NW is that it makes it difficult for everyone to agree on which site will be best. Will it be Woodstock? High Rock? Pulpit? For Saturday, most pilots wanted to go to High Rock but the forecast at the Pulpit was 10-15 WNW which is perfect for that site. HR was showing 8-10 NW which is okay but not as good. So Shawn and I talked and decided that soon enough everyone would change their minds and come up to the Pulpit. We met there at 11:00 and set up. Steady 13-14 coming straight in! It doesn't get much better than that. Not too much later the phone rang and we were told that HR was pretty dead and they were headed our way. We waited. And waited. We called to see where they were at. Voicemail. WTF. Gregory showed up with his Exxtacy so we came up with a plan so we could all fly. Gregory and Shawn wired me off first, I had a great launch and up I went. Soon after Gregory and his friend wired Shawn off and we played on the ridge for nearly an hour. The idea was to land after not too long and go back and help Gregory off. Gains were in the 1,000' range in textured air. I practiced some light wingovers and high speed stuff. I think I even got a little taste of some wave action. When I got around 900 over, I started really gaining altitude fast and the wind speed picked up noticeably. I got back down and headed out to the valley to land in the secondary. I set up my approach and due to the orientation of the field, when I turned onto base, I had a quartering tailwind, then I hit the gradient from the tree line. Wow did I lose airspeed fast! I always shoot very fast approaches so I was prepared to handle it. Turned onto final and couldn't quite get level so I had to run out the landing. Ah, well, they can't all be no-steppers. All in all, a great day, even though the temp never crested 30F. It was my first soaring flight at the Pulpit and also my first time with the Canon Vixia in flight. Turned out okay - http://www.vimeo.com/2719908