The Blue Balls 2017 event was postponed until Feb 4th. This date made for a small turnout as there was an important sports event on Feb 5th that a lot of pilots opted for, but they missed a fantastic fire, cameraderie and entertainment.
The weather on Saturday was windy and rainy with no chance for launching and a rough ride for RC planes in LZ1.
Sunday morning the wind had died down with high winds forecast again for later. Dennis, Typo and myself all headed to launch around 10.30am and watched the wind blow over the back at about 5/6 mph. After a while it puffed up the front a few times, so I started to set up my glider as it was wet anyway and needed drying. By the time I was set up the wind was coming in a little stronger and tending from the south.
After launching in to a light south cross, I managed to climb out to around 1000' over where I was parked in my Falcon. I crept slowly out to LZ2 as LZ1 looked very uninviting with the high South winds and large lake.
LZ2 was the wettest I have ever seen it. There was a large tree down on the road to LZ2 and when I had mentioned on launch that LZ1 looked a little treacherous in the conditions, Dennis assured me that if I landed in LZ2 he would cut the tree out to retrieve me.
I heard the chainsaw going about 10 minutes after landing, and Typo was able to get through right as I was zipping up the bag.
We spent the next hour cleaning up the debris and pulling the tree trunk off the road.
Not an epic flight but quite fun. I was reluctant to stay in the air to long as the winds were picking up, but not to bad for my first Hat Creek flight of the year.
Roger
https://vimeo.com/202855061