Post by thevon on Mar 30, 2009 9:22:48 GMT 10
Yesterday we went to a new site – it’s a farm with a great looking ridge. It’s taken about a year to contact the owner and get to fly there. It’s a very private place and they’re not keen on visitors, and it was akin to an international diplomacy exercise convincing the owners to let us on the place. Then it took a long time for the 3 requisite stars to be aligned, i.e.: the availability of both parties to meet on a day with a decent southeaster. As the reader can probably sense we can’t disclose the site, but don’t fret as it didn’t prove to be the DS nirvana we had hoped.
The owner and his worker took us up onto the ridge in a couple of quad bike things – must have looked funny with Sean and I perched on the machines very firmly gripping our Erwin and Nemesis respectively and trying to angle them in ways that prevented them from being torn out of our hands by wind gusts as well as avoiding fenceposts and trees.
The ridge looked really promising as it’s at the head of a large valley which we were sure would scoop up heaps of southeast wind. The useable ridgeline is narrow on top, several hundred metres long and it’s very steep on the front. The backside isn’t the steepest, but very clear and covered in really soft grass. There is a fence along the ridgetop, but that comes with the territory. And to cap it yesterday off the sun was out, the wind was strong, and the grass over the backside was still or only lightly stirring. So we should have been excited, but one concern was that just a few metres back from the lip, the wind was blowing the grass strongly, which is not a good sign. Good DS zones have a really marked separation between crazy wind and dead air just behind the lip.
We threw off and the planes bucked and dropped for the first 10 metres or so, then hit huge lift. To cut a long story short we had a great frontside fly, we noticed the air was rough close to the lip, but when we dived over the back the DS effect didn’t work. If you went dangerously low you sometimes got a small effect but nothing much. We tried all along the ridge for 150m or so and in both directions, but no luck.
A feature of the front slope is that it levels out into a shelf about 50 metres below the ridge, sort of like a 2-stage slope. It really seems that this disturbs the flow of air, coming over the lip. This is our idea of what happens:
Anyway all was not lost because we went exploring with backpack and planes and tried further along the ridge (no good, same story) but further along we found a big patch of tall trees on the lip of the lower shelf, which DS’ed really well. It looked a bit scary because behind the trees the ground rises up, not down! But we found the air behind the trees was very smooth and the DS effect was good. Not record breaking but lots of fun. We spent the rest of the arvo taking turns, gradually getting more confident with low lines. We hadn’t put the radar gun in the backpack but I reckon the fastest speed would have been around 130mph.
Interestingly when you stood right behind the trees the sound of the plane had a really “surround sound” echo effect!
The owner and his worker took us up onto the ridge in a couple of quad bike things – must have looked funny with Sean and I perched on the machines very firmly gripping our Erwin and Nemesis respectively and trying to angle them in ways that prevented them from being torn out of our hands by wind gusts as well as avoiding fenceposts and trees.
The ridge looked really promising as it’s at the head of a large valley which we were sure would scoop up heaps of southeast wind. The useable ridgeline is narrow on top, several hundred metres long and it’s very steep on the front. The backside isn’t the steepest, but very clear and covered in really soft grass. There is a fence along the ridgetop, but that comes with the territory. And to cap it yesterday off the sun was out, the wind was strong, and the grass over the backside was still or only lightly stirring. So we should have been excited, but one concern was that just a few metres back from the lip, the wind was blowing the grass strongly, which is not a good sign. Good DS zones have a really marked separation between crazy wind and dead air just behind the lip.
We threw off and the planes bucked and dropped for the first 10 metres or so, then hit huge lift. To cut a long story short we had a great frontside fly, we noticed the air was rough close to the lip, but when we dived over the back the DS effect didn’t work. If you went dangerously low you sometimes got a small effect but nothing much. We tried all along the ridge for 150m or so and in both directions, but no luck.
A feature of the front slope is that it levels out into a shelf about 50 metres below the ridge, sort of like a 2-stage slope. It really seems that this disturbs the flow of air, coming over the lip. This is our idea of what happens:
Anyway all was not lost because we went exploring with backpack and planes and tried further along the ridge (no good, same story) but further along we found a big patch of tall trees on the lip of the lower shelf, which DS’ed really well. It looked a bit scary because behind the trees the ground rises up, not down! But we found the air behind the trees was very smooth and the DS effect was good. Not record breaking but lots of fun. We spent the rest of the arvo taking turns, gradually getting more confident with low lines. We hadn’t put the radar gun in the backpack but I reckon the fastest speed would have been around 130mph.
Interestingly when you stood right behind the trees the sound of the plane had a really “surround sound” echo effect!
