It was a beautiful, clear, cloudless day here in SoCal so I packed up the Sharon and went to the EDSF field to get in a little landing practice for the last SC^2 contest of the year which is tomorrow at the TPG field in Poway, CA. No winch at the field so I string out my son's short histart ... maybe 25 feet of rubber and 100 feet of line. No wind so my first launch is maybe 50 to 75 feet ... not very high. I circle the field a few times in buoyant air and make a decent landing approach. O.K. the plane is trimmed and flying well. Next launch is maybe a few feet higher. I head west over the road to circle with a couple of handlaunch planes. I had started a 30 second landing countdown timer and promptly shut it off since I was going up. After several minutes I was at least at a decent winch launch height so I continued the countdown timer. It promptly went through zero and started counting up. I caught one thermal after another, would fly around for awhile then search out another thermal. My now count up timer beeped again signaling one HOUR and kept on going. I finally landed after about an hour and fifteen minutes. Was I stoked! I was flying the only glider in the sky. No hawks or other help either. O.K., maybe the 7 thermalling white pelicans helped for a few minutes and I did let a couple of other flyers share a little stick time. It was a lot of fun and my neck is still kinked several hours later. So much for landing practice, but I'll take it.
Jerry Millett RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
