22nd January - Headaches

I awoke this morning to the sound of Marimba playing too loud on my Iphone alarm! 8:00am. I had planned to get a taxi rider at 9:00 so thought I would snooze for a while as I had a bit of a headache. Couldn't be the drink since I only had 2 glasses of wine and 1 beer all day! Makes a change. :-) 55 minutes later I wake up. oh Crap. As it turned out it was easy to get a ride up to the launch site by taxi. At least they are all charging the same cost – 100 pesos, about $8.

My headache wouldn't go away and my throat glands were a little swollen. Looks like I had picked up something. A lot of the folks here had a head cold and cough so looks Like I had it too. Also felt a little lightheaded. Oh well, we shall see what happens today I thought.

Conditions were light and by 11:00am not a lot of gliders were in the air and those that were were barely more than 750 ft over launch. The makings of another high pressure day.Bummer. By 11:30 gliders floated around the sky like confetti en mass. Hmm, this could be troublesome. I don't like turning right as I don't feel too comfortable that way and it’s something I should practice more. The thought of having to fly in a gaggle that size did make me  a little uneasy. Ah well better get off the hill before it gets to strong. Mer left, wheeler left, Arun left Chris left then me. As predicted it was a bit of a madhouse up there with lots of folks not really looking where they were going. When you fly in a gaggle and you don’t see a lot of head movement from other pilots that is not a good sign!. Thermals are strong in this neck of the woods and it’s quite easy to come up quickly from below to people above you. My worry was that nobody was looking down. A few gliders had already left at around 8200 to head towards the Penon and were getting real low as they reached it. However they were soaring the face. TIme for me to go too! This gaggle was not to my liking. I headed off and got to the Penon about at the bottom of the rock. There was some lift there and I scratched a bit to get a little more height and then dove past i into the fingers at the bottom of the wall just like yesterday. Not a great deal of lift here and I was real low. Like 300 over the ridges. I went back to the Penon and I could see Wheelie Bob (Dave Wheeler) there too. He was also low. We headed back to the bottom of the spine that runs up to launch and we started to get some lift but also big sink. My headache hadn’t gone away and I didn’t feel like scratching anymore so decided to call it a day. Dave continued on and eventually got back up and headed out.

I took the bus right back to the lakeside landing zone and watched the gliders come in to land. Quite impressive sitting by the lake watching them come in. Dave and Arun had managed to get up and away from the Penon area and once on the Mesa they got high. Stefan was one of the first to land at Lakeside and I had a chat and a beer with him while waiting for the rest to fly in, Steve Theibult from Cashmere was on his new Mantra, his first real flight and he also made lakeside. All in all not a bad day for them. Best part for me was watching Dave Prentice fly in the prone position and come into land. I had heard about that but never seen it. Pretty cool!.

Yu can check out the video of Dave landing on my facebook page.

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1356246064539

Tomorrow is a left hand day, so I will try and stick this one out if I am feeling better and set a goal to get to the lake. I will wear my helmet cam tomorrow and see if I can at least get some aerial pictures.