A late afternoon meeting on Friday combined poorly with an excellent forecast. I could still fly, but not for terribly long. After a warm hike up, I watched around 10 wings struggling to get away - the wind was much stronger than predicted. Once they started going up, I joined them. After a few minutes below launch height I caught a nice thermal. This is the first time I've flown St Andre when the wind was from the SE. Almost all of the useful terrain faces the W, and (combined with my need to get back for my meeting) I wasn't sure what to do. In the end I flew over some smaller, rounded ridges out to the W of the normal flight plans. At one point I got high enough to consider heading for Digne but I had to rule that out for retrieve purposes. Rather than trying to fight the wind back to St Andre, I decided to land near the main road and got a lift straight back to my meeting.
Amazing how different the flying can be when the wind comes from a strange direction!
.
No comments:
Post a Comment