Greetings All - Tuesday Arvo Mount sortie

Greetings to all who have landed at this flog (my flying log!)

I decided it would be useful to post up debriefings of my sorties as and when time permits. Hopefully this will allow me to keep in touch a little more with where my time is being spent - both at home in the hanger, and out in the fields thrashing around the skies.

So just to get started, I'm not going to tell you yards and yards of background info  - other than I like slope soaring gliders. You'll learn more about me as we go along with this Flog. And so to today's little sortie up the top of Mt Maunganui.

I spent a couple of hours walking up to the top with a promise of 15+ knots of West as shown in our local Port of Tauranga's website page "Harbour Conditions". Here's an old pic of the page which shows wind strengths, direction and other stuff in yellow - all of this info is updated every two minutes. This is obviously a fantastic resource to have available for free on the internet. Thank you Port of Tauranga!!!

Ok so today was a good "forecast" and I did manage about 30mins flying the Karwai (below) but then the weather became more and more variable. At one moment if was blowing like crazy with big black clouds all over the sky. Then a few minutes later, the skies would clear and the sun would briefly come out and the wind drop off. 

After testing out a couple of landing passes, I managed to land without damage (phew) and removed 100gm of lead ballast from the underbelly of the plane. It was much easier to fly after this but then the wind got real buffetty and way over the back of the Kaimais I could see big rain showers coming. So another good landing - just love my airbrakes now they work properly - and after waiting for a while I decided the conditions were not going to improve and I headed for home. Not the nicest day I've had up the Mount!