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Flight Articles from Saturday, 4/1/06 (in order of posting time stamp)
[Tony De Groot] [Hansford] [Jimmy Z] [Bob Ramey] [Bob Anderson] [John Lyon] [Terry Taggart]

Jim Zender (aka Jimmy Z)
Saturday, 4/1/06

Wow... it's been a while since I've had a hard time coming out of the sky.... :-)  After 2.5 hours, my unexercised flying shoulders were burning and I'm sure Shaka was wishing he was with me rather than hanging out in my truck on launch.

The flight: Launched and immediately flew up to cloud base once I reached the thermal factory.  What a beautiful sight climbing along the sides of the clouds and living the dream I always had of flying among the contours of the clouds typically seen from 747's.  When I started to get tired, I flew out over SB, thinking I would find some sink to land and get back to my truck.  No sink was to be found so I decided to fly towards Summerland, check out Oprah's pad, then fly back.  I maybe lost about 500 feet in the process, but was then zipped back up to 3600 feet over Parma.

Flew back into the hills, played around at cloudbase again (Second round as my shoulders numbed and I couldn't feel my fingers).  Another 30 minutes and I was spent.  I flew over Parma, practiced some spirals to lose some altitude and landed.

After packing up, I just missed some of the Beach crew leaving Parma so I decided to hitchhike back up to launch (Batteries in my radio were dead, and new cell phone didn't have any numbers loaded yet).  Unfortunately, people weren't too stoked on picking up hitchhikers. I ended up walking almost 3 miles before a nice couple picked me up and whisked me back up to launch.

What a day... a little sore, but smiles all around. I hope the party went well at Robbins.  I'm sorry I missed it.