For most people on the ground, power wires are no big deal. For landscape photographers, they are annoyingly visible in almsot any photograph you want to take. (That’s why Photoshop’s clone tool was invented.) Looking up, the wires are easily seen against the blue sky. The problem for glider pilots is the wires are invisible against the background of foliage and it’s always the wire you don’t see that’s going to kill you.

Take a look at this photo, taken in a semi-rural area near Mendoza, Argentina. You can see lots of wires, right? Can you see the street lamp that’s illuminated during the day? The wires going to the lamp? The wires near the lamp?

Motor on, flying over Bariloche city, heading west. The volcanic ash cloud is clearly visible.

“Just fly over the convergence” says my co-pilot.
I’m about to open my big mouth and say “What convergence?” when I spot the waves on the lake below. The wind is blowing in two different directions on the lake. The little wavelts are all lined up in one direction at the south end of the lake, showing a southerly wind, and the north end of the lake is showing a northerly wind. The waves cross in the middle, making an interference pattern.

So I motor on over to the spot where the two winds are coming together and shut the engine down. Bip-bip-bip goes the vario. We’re climbing. Right over the lake.

Eventually we drift back into the ridge lift, find a thermal marked by volcanic ash, then push out into the wave. You can see on the flight trace the transition to stright-line flying in the wave.

Some photos of the gliding club at Bariloche…

The ash deposits at the back of the hangar…

Normally, when you write a tourist review of a place, you try to be diplomatic and look on the bright side. Something like “It rained a lot but it was OK,” really means “It was miserable and I’m never going back there again!”

My summary of Bariloche is: “Don’t come here. It’s really bad.”

In Bariloche right now, they are experiencing the fallout from the Chilean volcano Pueyhue. The original eruption in June this year dumped 10-20cm of ash over everything, collapsing roofs and closing the airport. But the volcano is still erupting every day, adding extremely fine ash to the air like smoke. Then on windy days and thermal days, the wind picks up the ash already on the ground and puts it back in the air.

You couldn’t pick a worse thing to happen to a nicer place. It’s like the hottest and dustiest gliding airfield except it’s in the middle of the city.

The view across the lake is supposed to show snow-capped mountains.

(This is a good day.)

Everything is covered in ash:

Driving from San Martin to Bariloche, we are driving into the worst of the Chilean volcano fallout. The ash is extremely fine dust, almost like smoke. It is coating everything like snow.

But there is one advantage to this fine dust: it’s easily picked up by the thermals. We drove through one area which Tago has dubbed “The Valley of the Thermals.” We could look out across the plain and just simply count the thermals. The photo below is very large, so it’s linked as a thumbnail. You should be able to count at least 20 thermals within this one photo.

It’s like the Condor simulation with the thermal markers turned on.

We’ve moved on from Chos Malal now. The last thing to do was go to a local machinist to get some parts made up for the oxy system.

Before we tested it, I did insist that they turn off the open flame under the kettle:

You thought it was tough putting 100psi into your bike tyres? Here’s Cholo attempting to pump 2000psi by hand.

Then we had a bit of work to put some new stickers on the trailer. (The stickers are sold by the truck-driver’s union.) Somehow the spot we picked to do this was infested by no-see-ums. Absolutely tiny, tiny insects that have a very itchy bite. They were as small as specks of dust - 0.5mm or so. Despite plans to carefully place all of the stickers central and square, they got slapped on pretty quickly after we worked out why we were so itchy all over. (The photo was taken after driving 100 miles away.)

A quick stop at Zappala airport to check the runway condition.

Tago found an excellent hotel in San Martin de Los Andes. It’s really a ski-resort town like a village in Switzerland. The accomodation was a cabaña with 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a kitchen. It’s more like a ski lodge. Since it’s their off season now, we rented the whole thing for less than $100 a night.

The hotel owner gave us a map with directions to the best restraunt in town. Of course the map produced by the tourist bureau doesn’t have a lot of detail and it’s not clear exactly what street is closest to the dot marking the restraunt. We drove down the main street (one-way) and then back up the secondary street that’s one-way the oposite direction. Didn’t find it. OK, go again. And again. And again. OK, that’s not working. [Get out and walk is not an option.] So we spiral in, eventually finding the restraunt in the street between those two main streets.

The airport at San Martin is a perfectly normal regional airport, slightly larger than Newcastle/Williamtown or Redmond, Oregon. But there’s no airplanes, Just three gliders and a security guard. The airline counters are all dark and the shops are closed.

Tomorrow we drive to Bariloche.

Today was the day after the wave flight and while there were big thermals available, I chose to do a photo flight with a camera strapped to the tail. The result is now on YouTube:

I think we have now passed the deadlines for submitting OLC flights for Saturday. Under the OLC-League (speed) rules, I came first in the world for the day. 180kph for 2.5 hours with no loss of height. That’s nearly 100 knots continuous ground speed for two and a half hours. Part of it was in a slow section, so if I’d picked the best part of the wave, the average speed may even have been higher.

Link for Daily Ranking (new window)

It’s probably one of the top-10 flights in the world this year, for speed. Distance wasn’t bad, 777km, but could have been improved by following the example of #1 for the day - launch early, fly straight lines and land late.

Another day in Argentina and another local flight. Of course when you’re at 27,000ft, several large South American countries are within gliding range.

I’ll be downloading the logger later, so keep an eye on the OLC. I expect that I did 700-800km.
I passed an open-class glider going the other way at 150 knots. Hopefully whoever it was will upload their flight to the OLC too.

Today was the first real cross-country flight I made in Argentina. The first time I made it out of gliding range of the airfield. Also, depending on how you read the map, the first flight I have made over more than one country. I think we may have stepped over the Chilean border. We certainly had Chilean airfields picked in the GPS as outlanding options.

http://www.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0/gliding/flightinfo.html?dsId=2171957

Of course, with cloudbase 14,000ft above the airfield, you have to go a long way to get out of gliding range. 607km total.