Piedrahita - Crossing the pass on 8th July 2014

Описание: Apologies for the titles as they're not meant to jump around. It appears a combination of iMovie to edit and iTunes Capture to upload from my iPad mini has a problem. There were also too many "I's" in that sentence.

Anyhow, the flight, I loved this flight as it was unexpected. The wind was from the North and so we had the choice for either The pass or El Barco. All our group headed east to the pass apart from Ian who headed west. With a low base of 2500m or so getting across the pass was not a given, and it was not an easy run down there in any case. However a bunch of us got to the corral spine and then across to the quarry. I hung back as usual, but this resulted in me missing a climb with Steve, Bob, Mike and Gary as I lost it at 2200m. They went over at about 2500m, whilst I scuttled back to the spine with Rob to have another go at getting high. Gary surprisingly came back but picked up something quickly and was off again in no time, whilst Rob and I took a little longer.

I'd started to cross with Rob at about 2200 when we both caught a corker at 3.5m/s on the averager and I swear I popped through the inversion briefly as it got cold very quickly and it was rather choppy. Still it saw me cross with enough height, and then after topping up along the way, it was a sinky glide to the river where more lift was to be had.

I eventually made 47km or so, but got pushed back to the southern mountains where I got to thermal over this beautiful small castle for ages. Unfortunately this was over three hours in and my GoPro extended battery had given up, so there's no footage of that.
The wind had by this time gone to about 3degrees and so I had to almost fly directly into it to make headway to my Avila goal, and as Steve thought I'd landed, he'd switched his radio off, so I was making my own decisions. I soon figured that any thermalling took me back to the castle, and so I just had to push through North without turning to make any headway. This of course saw me on the deck, but I was very satisfied with my 47km and 4 hours airtime. I was however a little unpopular as the others not only had to wait in the van whilst I flew, but then had to endure a rough track to come get me. I won't mention the Bob vomiting story (ops), but it was most amusing when he'd recovered.