Ridge Soaring Clouds

On Fri, 17 Dec 2010 13:13:28 -0800, kd6veb wrote:

On a good day and with suitable conditions you can do good distance
flights never going below cloudbase. In general it is slower to do
distance using cloud ridge soaring technigues than normal thermaling
below cloudbase but it can be a blast. A couple of days ago in a far off
southern country I was able to achieve over 2 hours of this type of
soaring arriving back over the field at 12.5k whereas all other gliders
were below 9k. Cloud base was 9k and the maximum height of the clouds
just over 12k.

Never seen it that good, but toward the end of September 2006 I was
flying on a day with good streeting and cloud base at about 3300 ft and
evidently some form of wave activity because a number of the streets had
fairly short side branches at right angles to the main street. By short I
mean 0.6 mile / 1km for the longest ones. I was able to ridge soar the
windward side of the branches, which were around 500 ft deep, and get
almost half way up the face. You're right - its fun.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |