Pulpit - July 18, 2010

We actually tried to fly yesterday. That was a joke but...Ahhh, today was much better. After Ward, Hugh, Bacil, Daniel, and Brian all launched, it ramped up a little more. At the same time Carlos, Keith and I were noticing that no one was getting very high except Hugh who was a few miles East. There seemed to be a lot of pointing straight out and very little "circling." So we gave it a little while to hopefully back down some and heat up a little. After all, it was only 1:00PM. As we stood there it began to back down and within 10 minutes it was actually light. Like, not so sure this is even soarable light. When that happened, it was like someone turned on the thermal switch and Daniel, Ward, and Brian all started climbing. Bacil was way down the ridge when this was going on and before long Ward and Daniel were pointed East. Carlos and I decided to drop his truck in the field so Brian, who was on a schedule, would have a way up. Back up top it was coming in nice but self launchable. Clouds were forming in the valley out front, looked good. Carlos went first with a nice launch and I followed, I think around 2:00PM. I saw Carlos geting up down by Rt. 16 but I wanted to hang out by launch to make sure Keith got off okay. As he was on launch I hooked into a nice thermal and climbed up to 1K over. As I climbed I could see Bacil getting high and drifting over the back. When I looked down again, Keith had just launched so I cruised out into the valley towards a great looking cloud. On the way I started getting hammered but I kept on truckin because I knew I would get through the sink and into the monster thermal it surrounded. When I was down to 200' over, I got the hell out of there and high-tailed it back to the ridge near 16. I got there below launch level and couldn't find anything anywhere. Carlos and Keith were struggling at that point also, the ridge had really shut down. We all stayed as close to the trees as we dared and milked every beep. You could clearly see the lift on the trees below and how spotty it was. At one point I was down 300' below launch and finally found a little section of the ridge just North of 16 that was working, maybe 100 yards wide. I zig-zagged around there in 50-100fpm and slowly worked my way back up over the ridge. Once over the ridge I stair stepped my way up in much more organized thermals to 1,800' over. It was gloriously cool up there and I was in good position to head East but as I listened to Hugh on the radio driving past Bacil who was almost done breaking down, I opted to stay local and make things a lot easier. I flew around for another half hour or so in the valley searching around for something good. Found a few small climbs but nothing great so I headed in and joined Brian, Keith and Carlos in a pretty rowdy primary. Thankfully it was only about 2 million degrees in the field and I only lost about 20 lbs. of water weight. But don't worry, I ingested about 20 lbs. of gnats to make up for it.... As we were leaving, RichB showed up so we went back up top and got him off. Another great day!