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Posted by Ray
on 5/19/2009, 6:15 am
69.205.81.50
Once again, another FLSC tow pilot selflessly and reluctantly leaves their work slog and drives from Rochester to Dansville to enable the infamous, feckless, and essentially derelict "Weekday Flyers" to play in their sky-box. To top it off, Rick had to wait an extra half hour since we got a late start, thanks to yours truly. So how was it? To quote FLSC's WBM (weather big-mouth) "Monday could still be quite good, although probably not super". But I also need to mention I didn't think things would start cooking till after noon, after a night of radiation cooling and a surface inversion to punch through, and a frost warning the previous night. But there was no frost, because during the night, a short-wave feature passed over western NY, avec a high stratus deck, and kept temperatures up, and thus less work for the sun to do the next morning. By about 10:30 AM the sky over East Bethany was already covered with good-looking cumuli...wow, I thought, maybe a super day after all. But that chunk of vorticity, picked up by the progs as far back as Friday, did come through and mess things up, relatively. We were finally ready to launch ~ 2, by which time the clouds were already starting to look a tad funky. Sure enough, Mark got off tow in a huge chunk of sucker-lift and had to relight. After that however, we all (Mark and Doug: Pegasi; Cy: Blanik; Ray: Grob) had a fun day. Not that you could effortlessly "go anywhere". You had to pick you cloud field carefully, and there were bodacious sink areas too. That damn vorticity again. Still, cloud base due to low humidity was ~ 8K MSL, excellent in spite of the leaves and vegetation now proliferating, and you definitely were not tied to the airport. We all landed around 5-ish so as to get home at a reasonable hour, although by that time the vort-max had passed to the east and the lift was better than ever.
Note: the relatively dry spring is continuing. No measurable precip for the rest of the week. On the average, soaring conditions are only going to get better. So, how much hooky can you get away with?
Ray
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