This was the flight that made the trip for me! It started the day before when I met two visiting, very accomplished pilots, Alex and Rocio. Alex had told me that it’s fairly turbulent and dangerous and it was a good call to have turned back, but the 13th is looking better, and they’re planning a Palo flight and I was welcome to join.
On this day, the 13th, I waited for my new friends to take off before following them. I was a bit behind as I wanted to make sure the younger students got off fine before launching myself. In hindsight, I should have launched earlier then waited for them around the first corner, due to my slower glide.
I was mighty happy with the start of the flight, to have found lift and have never been too low around the first bend. The wind was mostly from the West, and not at all too strong, making ridge soaring possible, but harder down lower.
Around the first bend, I was doing well to start gaining some ground, and found there were easy enough lifty spots on the ridge, and lots of buzzards to mark the climbs. The best climbs were away from the ridge, and marked by plenty of birds.
Alex as well up and out on front. Rocio was a bit lower and was helping me mark lifty areas when I had caught up. I made a mistake around the statue by giving her extra room and coming in after, but, found that I could not find her same lifty areas, and around the statue could not bench back up, was loosing altitude with just as many passes as I was gaining. I think this was mainly attributed to just the better pilots being able to make better use of the more lifty parts of the ridge.
I made the call that I should backtrack to the golf coarse, where I’d found some good lift, and that the birds were consistently marking this day, before I got too low. I got there much lower than I’d have liked, but, considered a great landing zone if need be. The lift was well formed, and managed to get well above ridge height again to make the second attempt at passing much easier.
I had later learned that with the time of backtracking, my new friends thought I went home and had pushed on without me :P
With the extra height, I had to stay under a cloud, ducked around the statue, found that the extra height made all the difference in maintaining lift, then continued on to Palo Bouque.
Once I was there, I couldn’t see my new friends any more, and the thought of heading on to the airport did pass my mind, but, decided my goal was out and back, so did a few passes of the back ridge (and ended up miss-judging one and being well in a cloud), got to see how connectivity was so good due to all of the cell phone towers behind and head back to the hotel landing.
The flight back was pretty fast, showing a shift to a more southy tail wind. My decisions here was to ensure that I was staying away from any ridges that might cause rotor, found a thermal out over the soccer fields and used that to bench back to the flags, then did the typical flight over the dragon and on to the home landing site that way.
Landed with plenty of additional height at the hotel beach landing zone, then got to see my new friends as I was packing up. They’d managed to head all the way to the airport and back in roughly the same time it took me to just get to Palo and back.
This was a special flight for me. It seemed like a dream to do in 2019 and I felt fairly confident performing it this year. It’s a wonderful feeling and marks progress in my flying journey that often doesn’t seem evident when we’re always comparing ourselves to friends around us.
This was the only goal of mine heading into this trip, so I’m so, so happy to have been able to achieve it.
The flight was just over 2 hours in length, covering a distance of 16.25km (10.1 miles). Pretty happy with this!