We don’t get a lot of opportunities to try ridge soaring in the Hunter.  Despite the abundance of likely-looking ridges, the wind never blows in the right direction.  The shape of the valley as a whole and the prevailing winds at this lattitude mean that strong winds only go straight up or down the valley.  Since learning a bit about ridge flying in New Zealand in 2005, I’ve been looking at one particular hill.  This hill forms a ridge that extends out across the valley for a short distance and it has a farmer’s airstrip at the bottom in case of the lift not working.  A North Westerly was blowing on Sunday so I decided to give it a go.

Here’s a diagram of my approach and initial climb overlaid onto a photo of the ridge:

Keep in mind that SeeYou draws the glider much larger than life-size so that it’s easy to see.  I have drawn on the picture some of the options I had available to me.  First, I approached the ridge with a good clearance above it.  Because the ridge slopes up to the left, it’s simply a matter of turning right over the lower ground until it looks good.  Then I kept the ag strip in sight and in a good position for a circuit.  The strip is much lower than the ridge, although it’s not obvious in the photo.  If I hadn’t found lift, at the point where the line turns red, it would have been an easy outlanding even though the wind is not straight down the strip.  This image also shows the classic figure-8 pattern I flew to always turn away from the ridge.  Each trip around the 8 is higher than the previous one.

After leaving that ridge, I moved on to the next one:

This viewpoint is looking exactly along my flight path as I pass through some 4-knot sink.  You can see that even though I’m in sink, I’ve chosen to cross the ridge at a point where I can safely clear the ridge.  The oversized glider icon obscures the small brown paddock I was aiming for as my primary outlanding option.  If this sink continued all the way to the ground, I would land in that paddock.

You can also see 30 seconds earlier in the flight I was in stronger sink - the blue portion of the flight path. You can see how I turned right after that, to choose the lower part of the ridge.  However the camera viewpoint is still above this flight path, so the brighter-green valley floor visible over the ridge is still reachable.  If the bottom absolutely fell out of the sky, another right turn would have put me on base leg for the paddocks I’d picked on this side of the ridge.

There were some very tempting ridges deeper into the mountains.  However at that height, in that wind, it would have been impossible to glide back to a landable paddock if the lift hadn’t worked.  “Aim the fuselage between the trees” is not my idea of landable.

The purpose of ridge soaring is not to scare yourself silly by getting close to the ground.  On this day, I was just trying to prolong the flight until the thermals started. Once they did, I immediately picked up a 6-knot average from the top of a ridge and climed to 5,000 feet.  I was able to do this with good safety margins above the ground and always having outlanding paddocks within easy reach.

Saturday was another outstanding gliding day with ten knots to ten thousand and 500km flights.  It was noticed that this coincided with the arrival of another overseas tourist.  Bern from Germany came to have a flight with us and the weather god put on a beauty for him.  Bern said that he’d never seen more than 3 metres/second (6 knots) on his vario back in Germany but he was at the controls for one thermal that was completely off the 10-knot maximum range of the vario.

Dave and Jeff flew to Coonamble on Saturday.  Dave’s score on the Online Competition shows he did 525km.  Well done!  Jeff did a slightly shorter distance and the OLC handicap rules penalise him on points because he’s got an engine.

Sunday was notable for the strong wind blowing from the north west.  I have been looking at a particular hill that faces north west for about a year now.  Well, it was working.  I soared the ridge from a low point of 858 feet and then got to 10,166 in thermals later in the flight, for a gain of 9308 feet.  It just goes to show that you need to have the oxygen and barograph ready for every flight.  You never know when a ripper day will happen.  If there was wave over the top then a diamond (5km height gain) could have been possible.

Here’s Graham Rock and Ian Bogaard after another epic cross-country on Saturday.  This was Graham’s first flight in his Duo after a conversion check flight.  These are the guys who reported 10 knots to 10,000.

Dave Pickles didn’t think it was worth launching on Sunday.  He eventually got off the ground and flew 488km.  He is currently sitting 8th in the world in the Online Competition for that day.  (More flights may be uploaded in front of him until Tuesday.)

Cloud streets at 10,000 feet on Sunday.  I followed these cloud streets back from Merriwa and didn’t lose any height at all over more than 100km.

Hunter Valley Mine dragline.  The small white speck near the centre of the photo is a Toyota Landcruiser utility.  We don’t normally get this close to the dragline.

Well, if you looked at the weather, you missed a good weekend’s flying.  Saturday and Sunday both started off overcast and gloomy but actually turned out into some fine days.  There was somekind of a trough overhead that moved back and forth during the weekend, alternately exposing us to sun or overcast.

Look at this launch in the Puchacz from Sunday - doesn’t the cloud behind look like a grey smudge?  This cleared up minutes later into blue sky with puffy cumulus.

In other news, the tug fuselage was sent away to Luskintyre to begin its re-covering. Jeff has been working hard on this since Lawrie has been in hospital.

Ask Ben about the airstrip conditions at Arrowfield (Jerry’s Plains.) He gave it a very close inspection - from zero feet!

Well, the CFI’s not known to exaggerate is he?  He really must have had 18 knots showing on his vario at some point in the flight and we know it can’t have been on tow with KKZ.  Saturday was a fantastic day, with three pilots achieving a 500km triangle: Warkworth - Gulgong - Lake Keepit - Warkworth.  Congratulations to Dave, Jeff and Ben.  Mark Woodhart did really well too, but when he was informed that it was a shoutable offence, he suddenly got very hazy on the details.

Have a look at their daily scores on the Online Contest website: http://www.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0/gliding/olcscore.html?date=2007/01/06

We had two “new” faces appear on the weekend.  One returning from 3 years away and one genuinely new.  James “Akko” Atkinson and Emanuel Scicchitano.  Make them feel welcome if you see them.