BAJA 600?

All the seasons I soared daily in New England, the closest I ever came to a shearline was reading about it — with one noteworthy exception. It was early evening when I spotted two osprey gliding in tandem up the middle of our valley. Pulling in behind them, I was surprised by soft, steady zero-sink that just went on and on for miles. All I did was follow the birds, as a little cloud formed straight ahead. And this was a half hour before sunset.Turns out it was cooling air down from mountains on either side of the valley and converging between, a phenomenon referred to by that region’s hang glider pilots as ‘wonder winds’. Among the family of convergence phenomena, this may be feeblest, because it happens over low ground and open space, as a function of subsidence at day’s end. Surely it happened there more often than once every sixteen years, but until stumbling across the osprey I’d never noticed it.(Why shearlines are novelties back east and common out here is a fascinating question. Don’t ask me. Someone who knows should pipe up and tell us!)So what constitutes a shearline? In simplest terms it’s two or more bodies of air moving together, impelling at least one to rise. This can be due to a difference in temperature-slash-pressure, or one homogenous airmass flowing around some obstacle and converging again. The classic sea breeze can exemplify both. Here in Southern California we have them all, greatly enriching conditions wherever they form.With this in mind, consider the Baja peninsula a few hours’ drive south of Crystal. Though more than 600 miles long, much of it’s barely 50 miles wide. Water in the Sea of Cortez averages about ten degrees warmer than the Pacific, and land surface temperatures on the two sides follow suit. What’s more, prevailing ocean winds (from north on the west and from south on the east) are pulled by friction, onshore — toward each other…An interesting website, nullschool.net, shows granular forecasts of wind, temperature, and scads of other data for the whole world in something close to real time. Go there and you’ll find a convergence developing the length of Baja every afternoon. As relentless sun bakes those stony hills, two onshore breezes collide with a combined speed normally in the range of ten to twenty knots. This makes it easy to imagine terrific convection running more or less continuously, unmarked except for fat spots, all the way from La Paz up to… some landable patch a thousand kilometers north.And therein lies the rub. Baja offers perilously few airports, or even dirt strips. Lake beds are rare and scary small, and except for concentrated sections of western coastland there are no hay fields anywhere. To salt your wounds, our line of convergence typically hugs the eastern (more remote) coast, sometimes spanning creepy miles of open sea. Still, not counting a handful of seventy-mile tiptoes, there’s nearly always somewhere within theoretical gliding range.Now think about it. Given the extreme dearth of safe landing options, it’s reasonable to suppose that this unique region’s enormous soaring potential has never yet been explored from any sailplane, ever! Thousands of 1000-K days have silently boomed along that rocky spine, unsoared. But today, with 60/1 ships and sustainer engines, it seems only a matter of time.Somebody’s gotta go first. You game?