On Monday (Labor Day), I had my longest duration flight to date. Thisi is my condensed flight report.
Flying out of Air Sailing in Nevada, I launched fourth and released at 6,800 feet MSL (or 2,500 AGL). I thought I had a good thermal at the south end of the Dog Skins. Instead I spent the next hour or so struggling to get above 7,000 feet. At one point I was down to 6,200 feet and ready to head in for a possible re-light when I found a bit of lift over the Moon Rocks.
I eventually got above 7,000 feet which enabled me to climb the low end of the Dog Skins and find my next thermal. It took me to 8,000 so I headed a bit more north and found another that took me above 9,000. I did this once more and found myself close to 14,000 feet. Figuring that going north was working well for me, I headed to 7990.
I arrived with lots of altitude, found a little thermal, and then headed toward the cloud street forming just east of Frenchman's Lake (a bit north of Adam's peak). However, there was a lot of sink near the ridge and I got a bit low for comfort and retreated back to 7990.
Arriving there, I noticed the abundance of excellent cloud streets to to the south and decided to head over to Stead by way of the Dog Skins. I climbed on the way to Stead, breaking 15,000 feet.
From Stead I continued to Peevine (?), Vedri, and eventually made it to Mt. Rose where I found a nice thermal to play in. From there I decided to follow the clouds over to Pond Peak. There I hit cloud base (again) and decided to tag Silver Springs. So I flew past Tiger, hit Silver Springs, and headed back toward Pond.
Back over Pond Peak, I got to over 16,000 feet and decided to burn off some altitude by flying 80+ knots across Pyramid Lake and Anahoe (?) Island. Sadly, I couldn't reach my camera to capture the beautiful views. But I did get to chat with a nice woman working the Reno Approach frequency.
Finally, I realized how long I'd been up in the air and how late it was, so I pulled the spoilers and headed in to land. For the first time I landed on runway 35 and even had a bit of a crosswind.
I'd post a flight trace, but my Windows notebook's hard disk died the evening before my flight, so the data is still trapped in my GPS. :-(
Posted by jzawodn at September 08, 2004 10:36 PM
