WHEN THE DEALIN’S DONE

After thirty-five miles of perfectly dead air I got stuck at eye level with the highest boulder on a low, nameless mountain barely in range of an abandoned dirt strip. Why there? It’s the tailbone of a long ridge that leads to higher country and very dynamic air. Certain lift was boiling above the ridge ahead, and overhead, but if I got lower here my day was over.I could work tight little bubbles but had to fly faster in steep banks and could not quite gain clearance from rising ground for converging currents to gather below. Every time I slid back to that same little rocky top the air behaved differently. Meanwhile…Tock tick. Some saves never quite happen after all.Impatience eventually lured me too far up the ridge and retreat from that foray ended beneath the tailbone. Any lower would jeopardize reaching the airstrip seven miles away. New decision each moment, each more important. Time becomes elastic, racing fast in one region of mind and nearly stopped in others. Half self-conscious half unconscious, too busy to worry. Time to DO it!It worked of course, eventually. What’s telling is I’d already tried everything more than once, run out of ideas and was losing altitude… yet REFUSED TO QUIT. It’s no exaggeration to say that some fraction of a single second remained before committing to leave the hill and land. It can be that close, but a fraction is still time on the clock. If I had not flown my very very best, however flawed that was, I would not have been still aloft when the right air finally rose. Nutshell.So don’t make the mistake of thinking precision matters only when you’re climbing, or winning, or otherwise getting exactly what you want. The most crucial soaring can occur while you’re losing energy but minimizing that loss in every possible way.Saves, or attempted saves can go on for seemingly ever, for tens of minutes or tens of miles…In a different time and place, we were fifty miles from the nearest airport with four thousand feet of usable altitude. The day had officially shut down and massive shade ahead promised not even one miracle thermal.To reach our objective at nominal height we’d need an achieved glide of 75/1. Our bird could do about half that, so without some kind of wizardry we’d fall thirty miles short. (Oh sure we had safe alternates below and ahead, and even behind, but we wanted more from that day than barely surviving the night.)Now how do you s’pose we made it?Elementary. Using long luxurious stretches of the weakest ridge lift as a kind of crutch, dolphining slow only in zero sink and speed-to-fly everywhere else, we more than doubled our range without ever actually gaining any altitude, arriving with nearly a thousand feet to spare!No really, an achieved glide of 100/1, honest, both hands on my thumping heart. Mull that awhile and imagine the possibilities.Then go prove for yourself it wasn’t a fluke.