Peter Williams. 2010

Stratford Wave Flight

A phone call Friday evening from Tim was to organize a working-bee on the winch. Glyn had sorted out the carburettor leaks previously, so Tim wanted to get the engine running. I arrived at around ten o’clock to find Glyn beavering away pumping up the eight tyres.

After an hour of connecting up new batteries, cleaning all the spark plugs, and splicing a new piece of wire on the tow wire, we finally got the motor running. We found a couple of more problems, namely the auto-transmission cooler was leaking, and the guillotine master cylinder was jammed. Of course in between all of this, we were poking our heads out the door to see what was happening skywards. The wind was south-westerly with signs of wave over-head the main road around Midhurst.

Tim made the call and phoned Jim McKay to see if he was available for a tow. He would be there in half an hour, after a bite of lunch. There was a mad dash for us to get down to the dairy for some lunch, and get back to DI WZ, and check out the oxygen system.
Glyn decided he didn’t want to go up and would get the cooler and master cylinder repaired down at Jim Finer’s, but launch us first.
We were airborne just before 1pm, and hit good lift at about 1,000’ off the end of runway 27. We took a 3,000’ agl tow over Midhurst area and released into 2 knot lift. We scratched around the leading edge of what we thought was the secondary wave, thinking we had made a bad decision releasing too early. We could see lenticular cloud up higher above us, so we kept hunting. Slowly we got into stronger lift, and within half an hour we were at 6,000’. We radioed New Plymouth tower to let them know where we were, with intentions of remaining clear of the 6,500’ Control Zone to the east of the main road.
We kept climbing in the area between Midhurst and Tariki. At about 9,000’, we radioed Christchurch Control for clearance to 13,000’ over Egmont. The oxygen system was turned on this stage, and felt reassuring, even though it started beeping later. Turned out the batteries were low. Good idea to have a spare set.    With clearance given and transponder codes set up, we headed south for a mile and then turned towards Egmont.                                   

The mountain had cloud cover all around, and we could not see the peak even though we were above cloud tops. Heading in towards the peak, and with a good escape route behind us we tried to locate the primary wave. There was no lenticular above the mountain, only a bubble where we thought the peak was. At 12,500’ and with no sign of any more lift we decided to head back to Stratford. No doubt Glyn would be waiting for us, dying to get the winch running.

We descended at 80 knots with full airbrakes out arriving about twenty minutes later.
A magic 1hour, 45 min flight, with thanks to Jim McKay, and Glyn.

The winch could wait for Sunday for a good blow-out pulling Tim’s ute.

Peter Williams
25th September 2010