Baldy Badly

Dan, Mary-Beth and I set off early, but not early enough. By the time we arrived at Baldy Butte, thanks to a couple of minor delays, the locals were launching. When we were ready to launch, thunder was rumbling from a big black cloud over our heads. We retreated to the car and read during thunder, lightning, hail and plain old rain.

The sky slowly cleared and four hour later the sun hit launch. Immediately, the wind switched from S to N - typical desert conditions, where the sun can act like a switch. I said to Dan we had to wait to make sure conditions had stabilized before launching. We waited while conditions weakened - a steady breeze from the N became super light. After 30 minutes we decided things were good and we would take a sled ride to the LZ just as the locals arrived back up.

We laid out and after some delays Dan launched in light conditions and started to sink out - no surprise there. I started to get ready and noticed that Dan was finding some lift and coming back up to launch; I could see conditions were strengthening. As I was ready to launch, I noticed Dan was directly above launch and pretty much parked. Despite this, I launched in strong conditions and went up but not forward; no big deal, time for some speedbar.

As I went to release my speedbar I noticed I had drifted near the huge radio antennae so I turned sharply away and that set me behind the ridge line. At this point, I decided I was unlikely to penetrate out in front of the ridge. I decided to turn and run S, with the wind. At this point I was around 150ft over launch, in around 22-25 mph winds, obviously heading into some turbulence.

I expected to fly quickly through the turbulence (with a ground speed of 45mph+) and build some ground clearance, but instead my ground speed was slow - I was in the backwash of the rotor. According to my GPS, my ground speed never exceeded 20 mph. I managed the wing as best as I could; I had 2 or 3 collapses, one of which left a big (but pretty simple) cravate. I kept the wing flying straight and cleared the cravate. I never really built a lot of ground clearance but after a minute or so, I found myself in some sinky air and side-hilled in around 400 ft below launch.

From here I could watch Dan as he turned and ran. He had a lot more ground clearance than me and he was able to land down in a wide part of the canyon without any problem.

I'm really struggling to understand my own thought processes. I'm normally very conscious that the decision to launch is super-important. But here I had seen Dan struggling and never even thought about not launching. Then I compounded the problem by not releasing my speedbar in advance (I only do this very rarely, when I know I'm launching into strong conditions, to avoid accidentally using it during launch). I was basing my decisions on old information - the weak conditions of a few minutes earlier.

I'm absolutely appalled by my poor decision making. In fact, it's worse than that - I never even tried to make a decision. I never really put myself out of 'launching mode' into 'decision making mode'. I really can't explain that - I guess I was just complacent. Conditions did change very quickly but that's a pretty pathetic excuse.

The second problem was not having my speed system ready for immediate use off launch. Given I screwed up this time, I need to adopt a different approach where it is always available. Then (if my decision making screws up again) I will at least have some speed immediately available.

I was very lucky with the turbulence and my wing; although things were gnarly, they felt managable. But when you're flying through turbulence like that there's no way to predict how things will work out. In particular, although the cravate was big it didn't give a lot of drag and it came out fairly easily. I need to build on that luck and improve my launching decisions.

Dave Norwood (aka Preacher) videoed the most exciting part of my flight and you can see that here -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrxhKJeq03o - a real video nasty.