Hi Gang,
My buddy Jeff and I headed out this am around 7 to go up to Lake Wilson for
some serious sloping. The wind reading on the Weather Channels Site for
Russell was already reading 14 mph out of the south at 5:30 am so we knew
things were looking good. The trip is about a 2.5 hour drive and by the
time we reached the slope it is already blowing a steady 25 with gusts over
30. I immediately pulled out my new Ellipse 4 and loaded in the 740 gram
ballast slug and with the help of Jeff had the thing ripping shortly there
after. When I first got the ballast system I thought I would never need any
more weight than that for my plane but after today I can see that for these
conditions a guy needs more. I have a line on a product that is supposed to
be as easy to machine as steel but weighs right at double what brass does
for a given size. My guess is that for today, that would have been about
right. I flew for about 45 minutes and then the wind started switching more
to the west so we had to move over to a different sight so I landed the E4
and away we went. The other slope we moved to was much more into the wind
but the landing zone has a major rotor so I kept the E4 in the car and we
got out the foam stuff. I was flying my Patton P63 King Cobra and Jeff had
his Patton Spitfire and we proceeded to rip up the sky until we could not
take it anymore. The wind continued to build throughout the day with top
gusts in the 45-50 range when the back side of thermals were blowing
through. Jeff got out his Boomerang so we could do some combat (he has a
wood tail on his Spitfire) and we proceeded to go crazy for an hour or so
chasing each other around the sky. Jeff managed the only official kill when
he caught me low and slow and flying with loads of ballast and no room for a
recovery. I managed to hit hard enough to break my second and last servo
arm of the day and by then we decided we had had enough SUN AND FUN for one
day. I keep telling you west coast guys if you want wind and want it
consistently to come visit us out in the plains. I have been out twice this
month and had 30+ both times. We only had one weekend in the month of April
with winds less than 20. Now if we could just get you guys to bring some of
your tall slopes with you. The Midwest Slope Challenge is in 3 weeks at
Lake Wilson, you guys need to find a way to come.
See Ya,
Pat McCleave
Wichita, KS
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