CATCH ME YOU CAN, IF...
We have so many special treats in Crystal's soaring playground they often compete for our attention, and there's no better example than the variety of shearlines that regularly form in certain places. The most accessible lies along Pinyon Ridge (we call it Second Ridge) six miles south of the airport. Occurring almost daily in summer when marine flow off the mountains wedges under drier air from the desert, it often connects to a similar shear that runs above nine mile long Blue Ridge. And that one intersects at its far end with another leading north from Mt. Baldy along the Mojave valley to El Mirage and beyond. With light winds from both sides common after noon, these shearlines and others somewhat less predictably gather thermals into reliable clusters, zones of solid convergence, or maybe so much of both you need to fly fast to stay below cloudbase. Clouds or no, such corridors of lift can vary in width from monsters several miles across to demons so narrow that the slightest deviation puts you off one side like a foot trail in the dark. Shearlines may run continuously for great distances but often are intermittent. And no surprise, the sink within a strong shearline can be impressive too. For each moment's a new one here in Paradise and you can bet there's always sink ahead somewhere.
What to do about that? As with any hindrance you can't avoid, see it as an opportunity. Find a way to use it.
Paddy and I were cruising in identical sailplanes along a line of absurdly periodic lift and sink. In learning to wield sky power through fingers and toes Paddy was a devout novice, keen with ambition and starving for info. There he sat a few lengths ahead and two to the right, holding steady as if for a portrait. Loving life no doubt, yet failing to harness much of the atmospheric bounty all around.
When he entered a sharp sinker I pushed over in a shallow dive and broke squelch on 123.5 to say, "Pappa Delta, look ten o'clock low." Passing below, I also passed by him and pulled up in the next lift, now ahead and higher. By the time he reached that same lift seconds later I was already diving again in the next sink, soon to zoom higher still and even further ahead.
Paddy keyed his mike and laughed, “Whatta you got in there, JATOs?”
Knowing he was a lifelong skier, I answered, “Like humping moguls, but going up instead of down.”
To certify it was no fluke, I swung around and formed up beside him, still ambling along straight and level at fifty something. We exchanged waves and I said, "Your turn. When you feel sink nose into it, and when you feel resistance pull up. I'll wait here and watch."
He overdid it of course and plunged hundreds of feet before bottoming out, then pulled up harder than necessary too, one quick yank wasting much of the energy absorbed from tons of boiling air. Yet even after those excessive inputs Paddy still had enough juice to loft all the way back up where he started. A fine first try.
At the same time he demonstrated a major point about speed-to-fly of which many glider pilots apparently are unaware: the penalty for dolphining too aggressively is appreciable, yes, but no worse than doing nothing! Or viewed from the other side, the benefit from any well employed combination of faster in sink and slower in lift will be appreciable in the good way. Run some simple numbers and you'll see that precision, though helpful, is not required. Think about that awhile, then next time you're playing a line of intermittent lift and someone's out ahead see if you can overtake them with nothing more complicated than timely changes in airspeed!