Simon King
Saturday, 1/17/09

2nd flight at Nuthouse

TT Jr. here, so i doubled the distance traveled from my last flight on this site, which is not saying much considering my last flight was my first flight there.  I did another text book launch there for the second time (I am not so much concerned with the size of launch sites as much as with how many sharp edges are in the vicinity of the launch itself).  There was a bit of negativity in the air before I launched, I decided to get up in the air and get out of there before it got to me.  Andy was getting some weird tangles and stuff when he was pulling up his glider, Dave had issues launching, and Deitrich and Art were a ways below launch scratching like crazy (not even sure why Art hiked up in the first place seeing as he managed scratch as low as he did and get as high as he did).

Took me a while to find the lift, when I finally found where it was I managed to shimmy my way up the hill.  I managed to get to 3100 above NH and was ascending and descending at a rate of 770 ft/min as I was heading East on top of the ridge.  I was not as confident as Art and Andy were that I could get enough altitude to make the next peak (we were in the same region), so I cashed in my altitude and flew to the green patch of grass at the mouth of the river.  Still had a good amount of altitude when I arrived and took my time getting down, practicing figure eights while staying perpendicular to the wind.  Did not like the wind at the LZ so I used a crosswind approach to land, keeping my weight shifted slightly into the wind while my glider and I traveled at around 45 degree angle off of directly into the wind (this allows me to control of the speed of the glider even if the wind is pulsing through the river bottom abnormally, had to figure this out myself).

Flight time was 42 minutes.  I was happily greeted by my beautiful girlfriend Kristyn and the not so pretty Tom Pipkin.