The weather over winter hasn't been very conducive to flying. With this in mind we recently floated the idea of moving Wednesdays with crappy forecasts to another day of the week, and this week proved a good opportunity to try out the idea.
It worked well. Wed was forecast for too much rain and the wind was more northerly, while today was for a more direct westerly and in theory, less rain. It proved to be a bit wetter than we hoped, with a lot of showers to fly around. The ridge however was working well, with a steady 20knots everywhere, except behind the showers as Paul from Auckland found out.
We did have to wait around for a shower or two to past before flying, luckily we had GPK and GNI to rig to keep us busy.
We had 6 club members flying, and a few from Auckland. Alan and Brett had a great flight up past Thames to Kereta and back, so well done guys.
We'd like to do this more often, especially as the weather is so crappy at the moment, and often the good days don't align with our flying days. We'll aim for Wednesdays, and try and organise a different day if one is going to be obviously better.
Also for any day of the week don't forget to book on the website. That way the instructor, duty pilot and tow pilot can decide wether to cancel the day or not, and so we don't waste their time if there is no one planning to fly.
A couple of handy ridge flying tips
- If there is a lot of cloud around, give regular position reports so we have good situational awareness of each other. Today there was a lot of cloud, some at low level that we often had to fly around. Giving regular reports of position, altitude, and heading helped a lot.
- We now have a common frequency zone up past Paeroa for the coromandel area. Check the VNC charts before flying up this way. You should report your position when entering the zone and when passing airfields such as Thames.
Hopefully we'll have more good ridge flying soon.
