Saturday was gray and a little windy when I got up, Åge was towing at Trøgstad so I loaded up and drove there to get some airtime. Johannes, Alf and Bjørn was there and were towing. I took one tow to 1000 meters, 200 above cloudbase :-) The conditions were slow, I flew over to a small cumulus that was forming, and tried to find the lift while I was slowly sinking into the condensing fog. I came out through cloudbase and could not find anything strong enought to stay up.

Searching the area I got a small thermal off the horsetrack, and gained 100 meters before it became too weak. The landing was interesting as I got turned 180 degress on final by turbulence, and chose to land in the next field across the creek. I could have tried to continue into a 360 but it would have been risky, no point in risking damage to the glider or myself. Johannes helped me carrying it back across the creek.

I went to the training hill today to have a look, very few students on this course. Johannes and Erik got good flights at Brandbu.

Some users have problems opening the IGC files in GPSDump when there is more than one day of tracklog. You can open the IGC file directly in a text editor like Notepad, and remove the lines of log from the wrong day. Save as IGC file again, not .txt.

It should then be possible to open and convert to DL format in GPSDump. You need a recent version of GPSDump, it can be downloaded from Stein Sørensen’s homepage

Fredrik and I went to Ringerudkollen today as the weather was really good, and forecast for easterly winds. Over the takeoff it was good clouds with high cloudbase, but we could not see of feel much thermal activity. It was 0-2 m/s, and too warm. I took off and found the air to active but a strong inversion kept all the hot air from rising. It was only a extended sled ride to the landing. I think the conditions were good if we could get to a higher takeoff.

It was nice to be swimming in the Sperillen lake, the water was very warm, and the dinner at Vik was good too :-)

My Litespeed S 4 is now for sale, it’s got the new sailcut compared to the “Worlds” version, which makes it the best performing Litespeed ever. The glider have all extras including carbon outer leading edges, carbon tips, carbon sprogs, and carbon inserts. The A-frame is Zoom aluminium uprights, and carbon Zoom speedbar.

The glider looks like new, it’s flown about 50 hours, no crashes, original uprights, no acro flying.

Link to the results from the Nordic Open

Today was totally calm and overcast in the morning, but as we drove up to Vole the wind picked up from the west. It was some heating from the sun and still flyable at the takeoff, some pilots from the XC course flew, but dit not get up. Seemed like a few “interesting” landings occured too… We never set up, and had coffe at the cafe instead.

Forecast for tomorrow is windy and wet, so I do not have high hopes… Next weekend we travel to France to fly the British leauge and the the European championships.

What a weekend, many new records and lots of new personal bests, including first HG pilot over 200 km. The paragliders had a comp in Hvittingfoss and got good flights there too.

New Records
New HG open distance record from Bismo
New HG 150 km out and return distance from Vågå
New HG 150 km out and return speed from Vågå
New PG open distance record from Vågå
New PG declared goal record from Hvittingfoss
New PG female open distance record from Hvittingfoss

I was in Vågå on Friday, and met up with Arnt and Frode to fly from Heidal. It was too strong conditions for flying PG, so Frode chose to drive for us. It seemed like a wise decision as we had some of the strongest thermals I’ve flown in, with accompanying turbulence. The combination of northerly winds and very cold air produced some real monsters coming off the leeside down the valley.

I did not warm up enough before takeoff, and I pulled a muscle in my left shoulder fighting the tight and turbulent cores with 7-10m/s lift. It was rock and roll all the way to cloudbase at 2600 where we had about 20 km/h tailwind. I went on glide and got a new rough thermal off the leeside of Teigkampen, I chose to leave it as my shoulder was begging for mercy. I still had 2000 meters, and hoped for a little calmer lift behind Vinstra. I got some strong smoother lift at Harpefoss, and Arnt joined me again. From there it was more or less straight line via Frya and Kvitfjell, before I went on a long glide over the plateau behind Tretten before finding new lift. Arnt was lower and could not go that far in to the mountains, he landed near Fåvang at about 60 km out.

The cloudstreet behind Øyer was overdeveloping, and pushed me more and more out into the blue and headwind created by the sea breeze from Mjøsa lake. I passed Lillehammer and hoped I could keep utilizing the lift created by the convergence, but cloudbase dropped from 2600 meters down to 1200 meters at the worst. It was too low to go on glide towards Moelv, so I broke off and spiralled down to a good landing at Brøttum, 98 km from takeoff. That was a new open distance personal best in Norway. Frode picked me up and we found Arnt at the pizzeria in Otta. I assume I would have made many more km if that cloudstreet had not blocked progress, I used just 2 hours on the first 90km.

I’ve added some pictures from Frya Cup in the album, and all the pics from the Worlds should also be there now since someone very persuasive asked me to put it online yesterday :-) I’ve not sorted or annotated the worlds pics, that will take a while…

I had to work Thursday and Friday, so I had to skip the planned Acro course in Voss. It was overdeveloping Saturday so no flying, but the weather cleared up and I went for a bike ride around Oslo instead.

Sunday looked very promising, I was up at 8:00 to get ready to go to Ringerudkollen early and if possible fly some XC southwest. Erik Vermaas called to get a ride since his car broke down yesterday on the way out to go flying. We met Bjørn and Erling at the landing, and went up to takeoff. It was unusually calm, the CU’s were building high around us, but no thermal activity where we were getting ready.

Erik took off after some paragliders were able to soar at takeoff height. I waited for 20 more minutes until a few paragliders were climbing good over the south takeoff. I took off straight into the thermal, and quickly climbed out over takoff, but it stopped at about 1000 meters. The conditions were strange, and even if there was no wind the cores were easily lost. I sunk back down to takeoff again before getting up together with Bjørn and Erik to 1300 meters. Since we had no permission to go higher into the TMA, any serious XC was out of the question. It’s not possible to cross the mountain over to Sokna with only 1370 meters under the TMA. We flew down the ridge, in nice smooth conditions, and landed at a small airstrip in a field. Egil and Erling had to wait in crosswind for a while, and Erling joined Bjørn and me at the airstrip later while Egil probably flew home.

Erik and I had meatballs, coffe and icecream at Vik to finish of a good flying day. The summer is here now, it was shorts and t-shirt temperatures all day.

The weather deamons scored 3-0 last weekend on Frya. Fredrik and I drove to get some flying under a grey sky. We arrived at takeoff just as Sven took off. The conditions were OK, with some turbulence caused by wind shear. As we started to set up the rain came in. So we took lunch instead. After lunch it cleared, and we started setting up again as the rest of the guys took off and got high. Just as we were getting ready the wave conditions set up and we got gusts at 20 m/s on the ramp. Quite unflyable. The pilots in the air got smooth wave soaring above 1500 meters, below it was turbulent and shitty. Trond “Hangman” made over 3100 meters in the wave. We packed up the gliders again, and went to meet Olav on his way home from Italy. Late at night it seemed calm again, and I really wanted to fly so I started to set up again in very nice conditions. Guess what happened as I put in the last battens… Yep, the wave hit takeoff again and the wind almost broke the trees. We drove home desillusioned and sad, decided it was not going to be flyable on Sunday no matter what. On Sunday lots of pilots got good flights of course…

This weekend we have a National team meeting in Vågå, I will go there tomorrow after work and mabye get a late flight from Vole. The weather forecast is very good for Saturday at least.

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