The Chronicles of Hammer (circa December 2000)

Being the recounting, blow for blow, of some early summer xc flying in the Cape.  (to get you all fired up, enough to quit your job, morgage the dog, and get your wing in the sky?)

I've just come back from a two-week xc flying holiday mission trip thingy, which was excellent.  We went to Porterville for a week (flyable every day). To kick the week off, I ran an xc course, which went very well.  We flew on both days of the weekend, and 8 of the 14 pilots broke their personal bests. Unfortunately Thinus de Vos flew too close to the ridge on a downwind leg, and crashed in heavy sink, onto a rock.  Awww.  I landed beside him, and with the help of Rob Smith organised a helicopter.  Many of the xc students and other pilots helped, which made it a slick heli-rescue, and contributed
to Thinus being out of hospital and at home already.  Two compressed / broken vertebrae, multiple fractures in face, and jaw wired shut for his sins.  He would have had fewer injuries if he hadn't taken his helmet and harness off after impact, and slipped from the rock in his dazed state.  I wish him a speedy recovery, and hope it never happens to anyone ever again
anywhere.

Shoo.  After that we all flew extra cautiously, and it contributed to a safe trip, I suppose.  Tracy had a fear of getting higher than the launch site, so she tackled that on one day with Chris and Pete and thermalled up to 2200m above sea level!  Just a dot in the sky, my happy butterfly.  19km out and return, landing because she was tired after 2 hours of thermic flying rather than the day ending.  On that day, Chris Hill did a 55km triangle around the Porterville valley - Launch, Cardouw, Pools silos, Piketberg, back to Rob's house in Porterville.  Pete made the mistake of flying too far north, and pushed out of the convergence line into the northerly wind, which always seems to be stable and sinky.  Some iced drinks soothed his disappointment.  We got stiff necks from looking up after that.

Later, after retrieving Tracy (Chris was still a speck somewhere in the valley), Pete and I managed to sneak in a flight at 3:30pm.  Nothing wrong with the thermals, which took us straight up to 2500m asl.  (See attached jpg. Sneaky Pete Prukl on an afternoon crossing behind takeoff.)   Yeeeha.   Only one thing to do, but to try that scary don't-look-down route straight over the back.  We stayed high, never dropping much below the back mountains again, and were soon pushing east into the Koue-bokkeveld.  The wind strengthened, but the thermals began to weaken, and I ended up soaring a 30m ridge for half an hour, praying for a thermal.  It came, in a sliced-up weak twisty gnarly type of way, and I got away a bit, but landed a further 2km on, next to that mountain that looks like Table Mountain, 25km behind takeoff at Dasklip.  Peter Prukl came down and joined me.  5pm.  and a 220km round-trip for the retrieve vehicle. Ooops.

We had valley release on two of the evenings, something quite spectacular - Chris Hill and I glided (yes, glided) to the N7 pass the one evening - 30km without more than a few soaring turns in high places.  That was definitely cause for cracking a bottle of chilled wine at the Pass, expertly provided by Tracy in the retrieve vehicle.  I don't think the smile has quite left my
lips.

After Porterville, it was on to Sutherland, a new site deeper in the desert. If you flew about 100km E from Dasklip, you'd be getting close.  It was an intimidating, arid place, but the site was kind to us, and we flew on the one day.  Inversion layer at 1600m stopped play, and because its so high (launch site 1400m asl, 700m above landing), there wasn't much space to recover.  We fought for ages, but never got high, so finally glided in disgust over the back.  A very easy place to topland, because the plateau is smooth and flat as a pancake.  Site record is 2km.  Could be beaten by a checker's packet.

Rain.  Wind.  Easterlies.  Eventually even the fantastic hospitality of the Lamprechts at Koornlandskloof was not enough to keep us there.  We wanted to fly!

We drove to Graaff Reinet, about another 600km east.  This was to escape the prevailing weather system which was predicted to foul up the Cape weather with berg winds, and was already doing so.  And the gamble worked!  We flew Graaff Reinet every day we were there.  My first flight was on my new Airwave Magic.  What a beautiful thing (see attached nude photo - just the glider, no coverings ;-).  After buzzing Peter Prukl on the launch site to get as much video and photo footage I possibly could of my new baby, we set off for the peaks on the right, called the Valley of Desolation.  I've never been around there before.  What did we find?  Valley release!  Yippee.

Lift for no particular reason. Sunset lighting cast against shattered spires of pale brown rock.  Bird sounds in the thick vegetation below.  After flying circles around Pete Prukl's Spear (eheh, I used my speedbar a bit, but he still doesn't know ;-) we cruised over town, with loads of height to spare.  I headed out on the Cradock road, for no reason other than that was the way that gave me a 65km/h groundspeed on my GPS.  Gotta love that! Landed 5km from town.

The next day I worked the slow, shifting thermals forever.  No basewind, and inversion at 1500m asl (launch 1350m asl) made xc challenging.  Eventually topped out at 2000m asl, above the Ouberg Pass north of town.  But there is a high plateau after the pass, and the inversion remained, so my band of useable air became rather shallow.  I landed at 27km, just as I did last year.  At 2pm, on a bright sunny day.  MMmm.  Must be the easterly, drying things out, pushing in stable air.  (Couldn't be my sloppy thermalling or bad tactics, no, no, no.)  We saw no cumulus the whole time we were there.

The last day at Graafies was wierd.  There was mist at 6am, and changeable wind directions.  A very strong thermal pulled through the campsite at 8am. At 10am we were on the site, but it was scary-strong.  The lulls were there between thermals at about 20km/h, but the roarers came through like freight-trains, gusting 45km/h, and leaving the fynbos quivering in fear. NE.  And way too strong for a paraglider.  We explored, looking for lower launch sites, but not really being serious about flying them.  We walked back to the bakkie, resolving to go and swim in the dam and hike the day away.

A strange thing happened.  In the space of walking 100m, the wind died completely.  Insects buzzed by.  A lone kestrel circled lazily in the gully. What?  We pretended not to notice, and fiddled with equipment, maps, and gps.  Half an hour later, and still as a mausoleum.  I was as nervous as a sheep in Oz when I finally laid out.  There's no denying the fact that Graaff-Reinet is a complicated, tricky, and treacherous mountain.  Once you're away from it, the xc routes are ideal, with major roads running in every direction.  But you've got to escape the mountain monster first.  The wind direction is difficult to read.  Thankfully Sneaky Pete was feeling brave, and so I got to film his launch and uneventful climb-out in a prevailing easterly.  Higher.  higher.
" Hey Pete, I can't get you in the shaky digital camera screen any more. How high are you there?"
"2200m asl" came the answer.  "I'm going to follow the Aberdeen road."
Well that's a can of tuna to a cat, so I committed myself, and boarded my Magic carpet.
Down.  Down.  Down.  And then wham!  up, wing banked onto the horizon to hold the tiny core, vario trying to shatter crystal with it's high-pitched aria.  Yeeeeeeeha.  I waved to Tracy as I shot up past the carpark. "Bye, I'll see you in Beaufort West," I whispered. One thermal to 1000m above launch, where it scattered to the inversion layer.  With altitude, anything seems possible.  2200m asl holds a commanding view of the Karoo.  There was a following easterly wind, so I raced after Sneaky Pete, distant on the Aberdeen road.

70km/h groundspeed on the GPS is a wonderful thing. But it helps very little if you don't find another good thermal.  I saw Pete go down at the 18km mark, and put it into my descending flight computer : hold onto anything you find.  The wind had a southerly element to it now, and I quickly burned off 800m in rough shear.

Well, I managed to climb out a bit above Pete, and thought I'd got away, but at 23km I was swinging my legs down and trying to avoid thorn bushes.  2pm again, and at the foothills of an Easterly-facing ridge.  Not a cumulus in sight.

Tracy didn't even give me time enough for the deserved penance of a hot, sweaty walkout.  My bakkie was there, minutes after landing.  Cooldrinks round off a lovely flight.  Long live gorgeous brunettes.  Long live the Icom radio.

Long live the South African flying holiday.