Wave watch: Mon Dec 7

[John Cochrane]

I'm going to watch evening and AM forecasts. For family reasons, I can't come up tonight and do the dawn patrol, though it looks best earlier rather than later. If it looks like 11am launch will work, I'll be there. If not, will stay home.

[Noelle Mayes]

Kempton and Jim Darke launched in the FNX at 9:03am

They quickly climbed to 17K ft working into the Snow Mt Wave.

You can follow their progress:
MapShare (garmin.com)

[Kempton]

Thanks to Noelle, Nick, Ted, Danny and Pablo for getting us off and after landing, but most of all to Rex for essentially doing a field repair of FNX's failed canopy lift drive by removing it right before we were to launch:
Williams Gliderport and the Mayes family are the best!
Will write up more on the flight next. OLC:
https://www.onlinecontest.org/olc-3....l?dsId=8232616

[Kempton]

With Rex’s tremendous help to enable us to fly, we took off at 9:03a. On tow I remarked to Jim how quiet it was, then realized that the absence of the screw jack allows the canopy to seat better. It was blowing 15-18kts on the ground, nothing terrible, and in fact encouraging me that the weak forecast would be good enough. Nick towed us to Goat, where we released at 7500 and took a bit to find the wave but then climbed at 2-5kts to 17k. Winds were a bit stronger than forecast, at 12k it was 35kts.

Some wave behind Snow, but we keep pushing towards Black Butte. Between Snow and Black Butte, we got lower than I like, so retreated downwind to the ridge N of Hull and continued north. Cut back across to S of Black Butte and continued to work some weak wave north to Anthony where it was stronger, then to the drop off on the W side of the Yolla wilderness. This is typically the strongest lift spot besides Goat. After a climb here, we tracked toward the forecast T15 ridge wave along a weak lift line. No joy at T15, but we were close enough to the Ruth ridge to give a try. As with all exploratory wave xc flights, I’m always watching the altitude to allow retreat to the last lift in case the next spot fails.

Knowing that the further north we go, the weaker the winds, is confirmed by our track where we’re just about on top of the ridge line. (Lighter winds = shorter wave length). We get to just past Ruth lake when the wave dies. Now I should have known that the ridge is lowest at this point, and pushed on another 2-3 miles where the ridge is higher than at Ruth.

But I’m happy to get this far, so we head back to our last good climb at the W side of the Yolla wilderness. It’s weak but then we move upwind a little bit and “boom” suddenly 6kts up and more. We head down the ridge line to Anthony still in 6-8kt lift threatening to push us thru 18k! It’s 100+kts to near Snow, but we skip the weak wave there to go for the “always” reliable Goat wave and.... nothing! Stunned and puzzled, one circle at 11k confirms 26kts from 080, nearly directly east! No wonder the wave quit 8^(. Here's the 700mb from around then:
but contrary to this, no Goat wave....
We test out the Clear Lake wave at what we think is the spot, but no good either:

so at this point, I'm not confident to try St. Helena. We go to the lee side of Walker and the Cortina's but nothing, so we head in for 6 hours aloft.

It was great to co-pilot with Jim and get him in the air again. He's now a qualified FNX co-pilot

[Jim Darke]

As Kempton describes above, you can always count on the Mayes family for whatever support is required to enable people having fun in gliders. They did just that. Then we went and had fun. It was my first glider flight in over a year. As part of the brief Kemp told me, "This is going to be an adventure" I replied that I found that a little unsettling because the Navy had once said the exact same thing to me and the outcome from that was decidedly mixed. Kemp does a great job of verbalizing his thought process and it was a pleasure listening to a master evaluate a blue wave day while encountering a couple of unexpected conditions.

I'm glad I passed the flight evaluation to qualify as a FNX co-pilot.
We all need to have a purpose.

[Peter Kelly]

A big thanks to both Kempton and Jim for the post flight debriefs.
We know it takes time, but the contribution to the community is invaluable.
Always interesting as well as educational, and very much appreciated.