Easter Weekend at Woodside

Alex and I decided to spend the weekend out in the Fraser Valley and get away from the city for the weekend.  Lots of big clouds over Sasquatch on Saturday so no XC-ing that way, but SW of Redneck Island it was nice and lifty, courtesy of a bunch of big cu's over the flats.

Trying the Aggasiz/Bear/Ludwig route didn't work for me and I ended up landing on a sandbar at the base of Ludwig (flight is here).  Alex made it up on Ludwig and was able to tag Elk and then glide back to Harvest Market.  Meanwhile I was hearing bits and pieces about a pilot deploying their reserve over Riverside; turns out it was an accidental deployment and he went down, hard, in some small trees that didn't stop his descent, with all the rescue crew (helicopter, ambulances, firetrucks, police) showing up shortly thereafter.  He was airlifted to Royal Columbian for surgery on one of his vertebrae but is reported to be stable.

Saturday turned out too windy from the NE; we could get off launch fine and the thermals were high (cloudbase was somewhere around 2000m) but it was so windy (20 kph NE) that it was hard to go anyplace, and those that went west ended up landing at Squawkum Park and reporting not-so-nice conditions.  Lukas made it as far as Deroche.  So after boating around for an hour or so I headed out to land while several other pilots ridge soared the north side of Cemetery and Hopyard hills over by Harvest Market.  Meanwhile over at Bridal a couple of pilots were able to get off the very-snowy launch and enjoy some nice flights to 2000m as well.

No flying on Sunday due to too much NE wind, more so than even Saturday!  Fortunately I was looking for a ~5 hour (non-flyable :) window to install a new lineset on my glider, so it was the perfect day for some glider maintenance.  And it was nice and warm in the FV with temps around 18C in the afternoon!

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