First day of flying in TX skies!

Because I cached a cold I had to watch at the beautiful skies from the ground for two days. Today I felt fit enough and of course Francois wanted to go fly on his new toy after looking to the weather out of a car window for the same period…

Got up at 7:00, breakfast at 7:30, went to the airfield at 8:00 and were ready at 9:00. It’s not a good idea to finish preparations any later, because things can get pretty hot after that time. Slow pace is the only thing you can do to handle the high temperatures/humidity. And so we did.. After rigging we went straight back to the hotel and waited for the first launches in the swimming pool. Went back to the airfield at 12:00. Cumulus already way up high, but as the temperatures were rising, so was the pace… I think we started somewhere between 13:15 and 13:30. It was my first flight on the ASH-26e and though I was well prepared, you just have to get used to a new glider. Ok, what are the flap settings again? Lets try to practice to start the engine: on, on, open, checked, where was that switch again?, on, checked, prime, let give it a shot: nothing… Hmmm, let’s try that again but then at 60 kts. Etc etc. As a reader you can imagine Francois was getting impatience so I considered myself prepared enough and tried to find where he was. Where are we going? Number 48? Hmm, I have only names. How many miles is that? No, miles, not Kilometers.. Etc etc. I think it took 1 cloud to lose each other, so after our first runs we try to find each other again and give it another shot. Well, after the difficult start we had a beautiful flight along the Mexican border with very few circling, cloud base up to 10.000ft and the best thermal we had was almost 12 kts (6 m/s) on the integrator. I was amazed how easy the ASH flies. Its heavy, but who cares as long we have this kind of weather???