We met at the bus station in Carlos Paz with a mountain of bright yellow North Face kit bags and a correspondingly large heap of Sky glider bags. Somehow (????) we managed to get the whole lot plus all of us into a renault Scenic and headed into the Altas Cumbres mountains for a 3 day warm up.Although the conditions were quite light we were able to make several flights and fine tune our kit.
Tues 12 Feb. We left the mountains at 6 in the evening andf headed for Quimili in the far NE of the country. The drive was long....very, very long. We arrived at 4-30 in the morning but were up and ready to go by 9-30. Wednesday was a blue thermal day with strong, gusty surface conditions and only Neil and Martine got off for quick flights. Neils release was quite spectacular; just after release he fell out of a strong thermal, suffered a big deflation and while trying to recover put his glider into a spin. Neil put his experiance from the Flight Culture SIV trip to Lugano to good use, induced a full stall, recovered and continued to battle with thermals but no real distance was made.
Thurs 14 Feb. Again, the day started blue but we quickly had Cumulus developing and conditions rapidly improved. Although the sky looked good and we were getting 900 m off of the winch, the 1st climb was very difficult with averages of less than 1 m/s. Neil managed 35 km but Martin really excelled with 125 km.
