Wall to Wall

Today was my first day-off in awhile, so I spent it by flying of course. Dougie and I hanging on launch with lots of World's Team pilots that have been showing up. All the top dogs from all the top countries flying around in every which way. Just stay away from the Slovenians, they will rip their brand new gliders into the air and turn every which way they want at any ol' time. But they are easy to spot in the air on their new orange Icepeak 3's.
Clouds popped right over launch today at 11am. Abundant lift and sink were putting pilots super high or on the ground depending on the cyclic nature of the lift. Major convergence had setup over launch and stretched out to the Wall and then towards the volcano. I launched off and flew around a bit before climbing to 11,500ft over launch in the laziest thermal ever. Lift was there in 2-3m/s climbs all day it seemed. Barely adding brake on my Icepeak, I would lazily climb out. So we flew to the valley in front of Espina around 12,000ft and flew amongst the clouds for awhile. Flying back over towards Maguey we topped up over 13,000ft and flew in between the clouds with no major cloud suck just gently rolling upward liftlines.

It was like a wall of lift where you could fly almost anywhere as long as there were clouds above. SO after a spell, Doug and I decide to just head toward the lake for some beers at 13,500ft. We push out and discover a 20kt headwind and arrive still high over Cerro Gordo but with major wind. We plummeted to the deck from there. Seriously, like we just went over the wall and tumbled down hard. Doug landed circa de Gordo and I landed at the golf course prior to the lake. The sink was so abundant there were two lake landings by pilots trying to make it to the lake lz. Walls of lift and walls of sink is how I describe today, which makes sense as to how the convergence was so abundandtly being forced over the mesa, once on the other side of it just wind. Up onto one and into the other. Another interesting VDB post thunder, lightining, monsoonal type weather a couple days ago. The weather has been odd for here. Now we are have stong winds this evening. SM