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. With light winds from both sides common after noon, these gather thermals into reliable lines and clusters, zones of solid convergence, and sometimes so much of both you need to fly fast to stay below cloud base.

Clouds or no, shearlines can vary in width from monsters miles across to demons so narrow the slightest deviation puts you off one side like a foot trail in the dark. Such corridors of lift may run continuously for great distances but often are intermittent. And no surprise, the sink within a strong shear can be impressive too. Whatever else is going on, you can bet there’ll be sink ahead somewhere. What to do about that? As with any hindrance you can’t avoid, the fun is in finding a way to use it.

I was cruising along a line of absurdly periodic lift and sink, following Paddy, a devout novice so green he was just beginning to learn how much there was to learn. (Paddy thought he was alone on that shearline, unaware that I had overtaken him since the last time he took a full look around…) There he sat a few lengths ahead and two to the left, holding steady as if for a portrait, loving life no doubt — and failing to harness much of the atmospheric bounty all around.

When I saw him enter a sharp sinker with no change of attitude, I pushed over in a shallow dive and called on 123.5 to say, “Papa Delta, look two o’clock low.” Passing well under, I also passed by him to pull up in the next lift, now a length ahead and higher. By the time he reached that same lift seconds later I was already diving in the next sink, only to zoom up again even further ahead.

Paddy keyed his mike, laughing, “Whatta you in got there, a jet pack?”

Knowing he was a lifelong skier, I answered, “Like humping moguls, but going up instead of down. Get it?”

To certify this was no fluke, I swung around and formed up beside him, still ambling along at fifty something. (As it happened, our gliders were basically identical.) We exchanged waves and I said, “Now it’s your turn. When you feel sink nose into it, and when you feel resistance pull up. I’ll wait here and watch.”

He overdid that first try a bit, plunging hundreds of feet before bottoming out, then pulled up harder than necessary too, in one yank wasting much of the energy absorbed from tons of boiling air. Yet even after those excessive inputs Paddy still had the juice to loft clear back up where he started, beside me.  We dove the next sinker together, a staggered wing formation with Paddy following my more moderate example… and after zooming up from that one he was hooked for life.

Run some simple numbers and you’ll see that precision, though helpful, is not necessary.  Because any reasonable combination of faster in sink and slower in lift will always pay, even dolphining too aggressively costs less than doing nothing!  

So next time you’re playing a line of intermittent lift and somebody’s out ahead, see if you can catch them with nothing more than timely changes in airspeed.  

Then challenge them to catch you.