This was my first weekend trip with my son where we planned on doing some flying. I had never been to Butch's launch in Oklahoma and had heard that it was a good place for beginners so we packed the car with camping and hanggliding equipment and headed off to the Danville training hill early Saturday morning.
I was the first one off at the training hill. I didn't really need the practice but I didn't want David to fly this hill for the first time in a harness he had never used without me trying out the combination first. The harness/ glider combination worked fine for me and I had no trouble missing the cows so next was David's turn. He also had a great first flight and decided that he should need only two flights as a refresher.
By this time, Chris Price had arrived with two first time students. Chris flew his falcon down then stepped away from the landing area that he had mowed the day before so that David could fly. Chris briefly flew hands off so naturally, David tried the same trick on the way down. Thankfully, falcon's are easy to fly and the trick did not result in any mishap. It was a good flight just like the first one. We packed up the glider and said goodby to Chris, Walter Jordan, and Chris's two students.
We arrived at Butch's launch at nearly 12 PM. Steve Prater, Butch, Tom Ghram, Jim and Butch were all there. There were also some kids running around and I assumed that they belonged to Butch. Steve had flown earlier and was a bit tired so I jumped at the chance to have a flight when he offered to drive me back up. I expected to have a long flight to 6000 feet but launched into wind but no thermal lift. It took much longer than expected to fly out past the trees and into the open air. The people on launch told me later that out in open air is too far out. You must stay near the trees to get up! That thought does not set very well with me right now.
Steve did come out to get me as promised and David and I set up for flight later in the day. The wind never eased up though and after receiving some advice from Tom Ghram, we decided to partially break down the glider (so it wouldn't blow away) and drive down to the landing field to have a look. we identified many of the tree stumps which needed to be avoided and also the creek which should not be landed in. By the time we got back to launch, the wind had backed off a bit but with our glider partially disassembled, there was no way to launch and land with adequate daylight.
The next morning, I setup the glider while David slept because there were periods with very little wind. We decided not to launch though because it was unpredictable when the winds would suddenly pick up. Also, the flag on the water tower showed a strong cross wind and it was likely that I just wasn't reading the launch conditions correctly. We don't have any shallow launches like that one in Arkansas that I know of.
We stopped by Mag on the way to the Short Mountain landing field and heard that soaring was good at mag on Saturday. They were surprised to hear that we had so much wind in Oklahoma.
The landing field for Short mountain is huge with no permanent obstacles. As soon as the hay bales are picked up, my son and I will do some soaring there. I have been reluctant to fly there because I didn't know that the new fields were so much larger than the one I landed in as a newcomer.