Land, Sea and Sky

A January 2020 1000K attempt from Avenal Morgan Hall and Kempton Izuno    Jan 16, 2020, 1:00pm Seeing it coming January 7th 10:46am Kempton is texting me that he sees a super day for southwest wave out of Paso Robles on Thursday the 16th. Coastal range should trigger enough wave to access it from relatively local to Paso. Nixus happens to be rigged at Paso Robles and might be available. Many hurdles to cross for that to happen though. It's right in the middle of additional flight testing and verification. We agree to watch the forecast and let things firm up. I do block my calendar out at work just in case. I alert Jim Payne and Paulo Iscold about the possibility thinking that Jim may want to use Nixus for a flight. If not, I am hoping it will be available. Then we wait. Will it improve, degrade stay on track? Kemp: Morgan and I had known each other for years but never flew together. With many years of mentoring cross country pilots in each of our...

Walt Rogers got me excited that the weekend held an opportunity to continue my quest to capture the egg from it's nearly permanent home at Air Sailing.  Great conditions were called for in the Great Basin, the challenge as always is connecting from Avenal to the desert. I had a plan, a westerly line down the California Valley, jump to the Sierra Madre's near Santa Ynez and run the convergence past the Tehachapi's connecting to the Sierra and blasting north hoping for something late in the day near Minden for final glide into Air Sailing.  Sunday, we'd take a tow out of Air Sailing, egg safely tucked in the Duo and fly back South hopefully getting to 18k somewhere down near Mammoth and dead glide our way back across the Sierra and the valley towards Avenal. Conditions looked like they might allow for an early (for Avenal) start around noon.  I was set to go it alone in the Duo as Karl was flying our ASW-20 with Julie willing to crew should I end up short or need a re...