Heres whats been cooking

Spent 3 days around end Feb at Kamshet. In terms of flying the trip was just about worthwhile, with the expected West winds not stabilising and the days being spent between Shellar and Tower East face. The best flight of the trip was the day I landed at Kamshet, and it being a weekend it was just me and Anish soaring in the silky smooth evening conditions at Shellar. The rest of the 3 flights that I managed to get in the trip were bombed-out affairs with a memorable one being riding a big thermal in front of Tower taking me upto 1300m and then finding sink around it that dumped me as fast as I had gone up and with all four of us flying at that time bombing out in quick succession. But apart from flying, as usual, the Kamshet trip was fun, with all the pilots and students at Pendu's base camp at Khandala. To round off the trip, before getting on to the flight back to Bengaluru to be in time for work, had to drop a friends RD350 to his place at Chinchwad after riding for 40kms starting at 4.30 in the morning from nippy Khandala, which was an awesome trip by itself.

This was followed the week after with I, Hari and Venu driving down to Vagamon for another long weekend. Cranky weather meant that the first 2 days were spent PGwaiting with just one small exploratory flight by Hari, but with some good timepass hops at the bunny hill. Day 3 looked promising, but after launching at midday and getting caught in between the west winds at takeoff and the east ones higher up, mixed up with the infamous mid-day thermals meant that I had a tough time keeping the wing over my head. After a few botched toplanding efforts and a big assymetric, had to give in to the punchy conditions and I took the long glide down to the smallish school ground in the valley for landing. Again, though not much flying, had good fun with Vinil and friends at his new cottage. And, had an important realisation during the to and fro drive from Bengaluru - the Gypsy is fun when at the drivers seat, anywhere else sucks.

So whats been the rest of the club been upto? Vrata, Rajesh and Chetan have been flying at Yelagiri on and off, Avinash did some good airtime at Virar and Hari is just returning to base after a month long trip to Billing.

And whats coming up? With Nandi still out of bounds, the hope is that Nandi 2 and Yelagiri will get us some airtime with the west winds expected to kick in soon.

keep soaring,
arvind