As the weather on the North side of the Alps over the weekend was changing rapidly towards 'winter', I decided at short notice to travel South (Piemonte -Italy) as conditions there looked flyable (at least until Tuesday) with temperatures up to 20°C. So I left home on Saturday afternoon and drove via San Bernardino to Ivrea; I preferred to travel that way as in front of the Gotthard tunnel queues of up to 6km were reported on the radio :-(
Today at 1000 I met my friend Ennio at the LZ for Andrate (San Germano). He was going to do 2 tandem flights on his hangglider and I offered to drive his car down after his first take-off (at 1145).
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| Andrate |
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| 'San Giacomo'-launch |
The day looked rather promising, but at the time of Ennio's first flight thermals had been not strong enough yet.
Unfortunately, his second passenger arrived only at 1330, so I was ready to launch finally by 1430. Meanwhile the weather had changed quite a bit...
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| looking SE along the Serra towards Lake Viverone |
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| at the same time: looking North into the Aosta Valley |
LZ San Germano
Nice strong thermals (up to 5m/s) quickly got me to cloudbase. But then the clouds (over)develloped rather quickly and it even started to rain a little :-( Therefore I cut my flight short. While packing up there could even some thunder be heard. (When driving back to my B&B it was raining rather heavily.)
Obviously (with hind sight!) I shouldn't have offered to drive Ennio's car but should have waited on launch till about 1300 as then I would (most probably) have had a decent flight in good conditions...
As Ennio is unable to join me for the next wo days, he put me in contact with PierAndrea Patrucco (the local 'crack' - he flies up to 600hrs/year mostly in this reagion), who agreed to 'take care' of me on Monday and Tuesday ;-)
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