Tati and I decided to take advantage of the day and see what it would give us. It was good that Tati was available to come along as he had experience flying ridge lift on the west side of the mountains over Collique, The old civil aviation airport in Lima. (This was back in the 80's and 90's before most sport aviation collapsed in Peru).
As the image tracks show, we took of Lib Mandi's airport and headed towards the ocean so we could fly right in front of a 1000 ft wall facing directly into the ocean. We expected to catch some serious updrafts, but the wind was to south so they where not as powerful as we would have expected.
From there we headed straight into the valley, as usual at lower altitudes we found some lift but to small to work with our ship. 50kts is to fast and does not allow for tight 8 turns over the lift area. As we gained altitude we switch to the other side of the valley, as it looked that at altitude the wind was more westerly.
Judging by the intermittent orange areas ( indicating excess lift over our standard powered climb shown in yellow) the wind somewhat aligned to valley creating lift on the right side.
Further up we switched to the left and found nothing but sink. (I did not logged winds aloft in this flight.. for next one I'll make sure to do it!)
At about 8'000ft next to cerro Condorcoto (Condor Mount) we zig zaged looking for lift with not much luck, until we found some on the way to the the origins of the valley up at 11'750ft . From there, we stopped the engine and glided our way back while exploring both sides of the valley.
The Sinus manual on the tricycle configuration suggests 27:1 glide ratio.. in our experience, flying at 60kts, we consistently got 25+:1 , so much that we had to circle down as we left the valley because as usual the coast region was covered with cloud layer at about 2500ft .
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