Whenever it rains, as it did last night and early this morning, a puddle of slimy mud bars the entrance to the Great Meadow. Compounded from a mixture of clay, goose droppings and water, it’s worse than simple dirt-based mud. One of these days, I’m going to turn a not-on-purpose somersault as I negotiate this hazard.

Wild Combat. In the wake of the storm, Thursday’s north wind was quite frisky, gusting up to about 15mph. Dave and I waged wing warfare for three flights, alternately whacked around, stalled and accelerated by unpredictable blasts of air. We didn’t make much contact—I think we hit each other only once—but agreed that this is the best kind of combat flying.

I crashed a lot—hard enough to split the foam in two places on my lightest wing—and we both got blown into the trees behind us several times and had to fight our way out. We were tantalized by slo-mo sequences when it seemed like we could creep up on our foe, then slammed across the field, fighting for control.

Squishy Ground. When we landed prematurely, the squishy swampy grass reminded us to walk oh-so carefully as we went to retrieve the plane.

Wings love the wind and survive this rough and tumble, somersaulting and pancaking and bouncing back to fly again.

Me, I have to walk carefully.

Tags: Airplanes, Baylands, Combat, Crashes, Flying, Radio Control, Trees, Wind, Wings.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Baylands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.