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With rain forecast for much of yesterday day at Sisteron, there wasn't much hope for any flying so Ariane and I decided to have a day of R&R with our guests Maggie and Lorna. Lunch at Manosque was followed by ice-creams at
Moustiers, where by sheer coincidence we bumped into this week's JAC pilots, Tony and Darrel. A long drive up the Gorge du Verdon completed our day out.
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Moustiers Ste Marie
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Today's flying carried its oddities. The boss of the day gave us the Meteo France version of the weather, but as it is based on flying over flatlands, I couldn't see the point. The forecast included top of convection at 1200m asl, which was meaningless in the mountains.
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Looked good - wasn't...
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On launching I had a firm 4-knotter at Hongrie to around 6000ft, but that was to be the last good climb for a further two hours. Few of the thermals I tried were round, and the remainder disappeared after a couple of turns. At Blayeul I decided to try my luck further south but found the same annoyances there too. I reached the Montagne Ste Victoire and headed back north where, at last, conditions started to become more predictable.
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Gorge du Verdon
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Another oddity was the position of cloud over the parcours ridges. With a westerly wind one would expect the clouds to be directly above or to the east of the west facing slopes, but at Montagne de Coupe and Cheval Blanc, for example, they were a couple of km into wind. I couldn't see a reason for that.
I carried on along the parcours, dropping to around 6800ft round the corner of the
Cheval Blanc, but my heart picked up again after a couple of figures-of-eight to get above the next ridge. The summits of the Trois Eveches were in cloud, but 8000ft there was comfortable, apart from Flarm banging off every couple of minutes warning of yet another potential mid-air collision. Ten minutes on Morgon were enough for me; with another four gliders each "doing their own thing", I managed to lose about 700ft before running away back to the sanctity of the Dormillouse.
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Part of a solar farm near St Auban
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It seemed safer and less stressful to return to the lac St Croix, at the south of which I made
my final turn before returning home. I noticed in passing that the French
have embraced renewable energy sources in a big way, with huge areas of land
blanketed with thousands of solar panels.
I burnt off some height by gliding to Chabre; just as I arrived above the ridge, the 1 knot southerly my LNAV displayed turned suddenly into a 17 knot north-westerly.
Which I suppose could explain today's unusual thermal behaviour. And despite the frustrations of the day, I still managed to clock up another 400+km flight.
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