Purple Haze

God has been playing with matches. Remember the evening lightning show I mentioned on my last post? Well those were the matches that started 50 fires about 50 kilometers from here. But that hasn't stopped us from flying. Yesterday was task 2 of the Mystic cup, another brilliant task that took a 42 kilometer trip around some of the small valley systems near Bright. We had southerly winds yesterday and they come from the Antarctic, so the air is cool and that makes for a great lapse rate. Pilots got to 10,000 ft yesterday. I got squashed into a small LZ just North of Freeburg, and 3 gliders dropped in shortly after. The smoke from the fires blew in by the afternoon turning the sky into dirty milk.

Today was another story - there was a lot of smoke in the air but in spite of that we had cumulous clouds today - we haven't seen cu's over Bright for weeks. Base was about 2300 meters (7200 ft) and the air was blue and clear above me. I flew around for a couple hours practicing thermalling to the right, and then I flew toward a small hill on the south side of Bright which we call Apex, it is a known to be a good thermal trigger. In the valley to the East of Apex I spotted smoke rising in a column, so I reported the fire over our flying frequency and Brian Webb heard me and relayed the message to Barb who called the police or fire department.

I went for a walk up into the Pine forest behind my house about 6pm and by the time I got back at 8pm the smoke was really thick, visibility was about 1.5 kilometers. As I type this post in the house, my eyes are burning from the smoke... I just checked the fire web site, and the fire has burned 10 hectares (24 acres). I just heard there is a fire ban tomorrow, so Mystic is closed... again.

Hey, but don't everyone worry about me, I will still get lots of airtime, I might have to drive 3 hours to the town of Corryong which has a couple of benefits, first, it's not on fire, second, it's not in a valley system like Bright so they don't get blown out as much as Mystic. I hear they have a nice place to camp there and a couple of pilots even live there so it should be a slam dunk. For the Australians, that means it's a sure thing.

Hey, Cascadia, can we have some of your rain?

Beepin' our way to Base...