Super smooth lift at Blanchard today. Flying out way over Samish Bay, to Chuckanat Ridge and towards Edison. Lots of happy pilots and eagles out to enjoy the reprieve from the bad weather. But temperatures are winter-like... cold-finger forced landing after a little over 2 hours.
Best Blanchard flights ever! So far my flights here have either been disappointingly short sled rides or ridge soaring to 50 or 100 meters above launch. It didn’t look as if the clouds in the Fraser Valley would clear so we decided to give Blanchard a try. We arrived to nice puffy clouds out over the flats and cycles coming in. Easy launching, thermaling to cloud base, flying out over the water, coming back to the hill and repeat again. There were even a few climbs over the flatland I managed to get up in. Excellent spring flying with a nice group of fellow canucks.
There I thought flying was over for the year, getting ready for the pow season and looking longingly at first dustings of snow on the local mountains.
But no, we keep getting nice flights! Last Saturday at Blanchard was another one of these unexpected nice days (Whidbey not too far away was blown out and raining).
All of us had a couple of sled rides at first. But my last flight was awesome. Wind had picked up and provided good lift. Strong enough that I started playing with big ears, speedbar and small wingovers. Lots of fun on my big swing-set in the sky.
Finally also got the top-view camera set up and it worked like a charm. Editing the HD video was another story – very tedious. Producers of the little HD cameras seem to use their own codecs and while the quality can be amazing, using older software to edit is a pain.
