This week we continued flying in the area looking for good lift.
First, with Juan as co-pilot, we we enjoyed several good thermals while climbing power assisted to 8'000 ft. The first 5'000 feet the thermals where good, as the engine was almost idle, from there after not to much.
When we got to Cerro Condorcote we stopped the engine, feather prop and worked our way back while looking for potential thermal spots. We found some but not wide enough for the speed of the Sinus (50kts) but I am sure para-gliders would do quite well. ~ +2m/s.
The day after, we climbed again with Mauricio, with similar results but we changed the return path to be on the other side of the valley to see how it looked. It was about the same.
Both days the weather was quite sunny, no clouds (as always in summer) with very little wind. All in all, no surprises.
Coastal Lima is really not the best place for gliding. Even in the best of summer days, the most we get thermaling our paragliders over the mountains of Pachacamac is 3'000 ft. For thermals, we are cursed with a year long thermal inversion.
As I understand it, the high terrain in the Andes, where is mostly sunny, warm up the upper layers of the atmosphere while down below the cold ocean currents cool the lower areas resulting in a year round boring stable air. That is why in the central coast of Peru it hardly ever rains. (Several years ago during an El Niño year, it barely rained about 5cm , resulting in first page news and flooded roofs all over !)
For Paragliders, Miraflores with its 5km ridge facing the ocean winds is a great place to fly.
Almost every day, when the wind kicks over 14km/h you can take of from a park close by and cruise for hours on a smooth ride of laminar air along the ridge, literally a few meters from the buildings facing the ocean.
For sailplanes, our only choice in the coast, is to wait for one of those rare high winds days, and go for a wind facing mountain ridge on any of the valleys close by.
Back to the point of this post.. This month we been flying a lot! Almost every week we continued exploring the area while climbing power assisted up the Chilca valley to 8'000ft then, cut the engine an return gliding.
Many days we found decent thermals but only to 3'000 feet, over that we only found short updrafts following the windward side of the mountains.
We recorded all our flights on several instruments that collected time coded data of altitude, wind, temperature, lift and sink to be used along GPS tracks for coded Google earth plots.
The image on the right, shows our GPS tracks color coded by lift strength, indicating our power assisted climb in yellow , then the various levels of sink (an a bit climb!) as we returned to base.
I will continue posting plots as we go along our journey.
