I arrived at Logan from Europe on Friday night and once again was fortunate enough to find soarable weather shortly upon returning from my travels. After several weeks on the road without a chance at a soaring flight it would have taken worse conditions than the low cloud cover and high winds to keep me from attempting a flight. 2pm found me untying "PS" and performing a pre-flight while Wes and Bob were doing the same with the Blanik. The flat cumulus clouds whipping by the airfield at low altitude coupled with the rather hefty and erratic movements of the wind socks made me wish for a more substantial ship than the B4 (I suppose it could have been worse, I could have been preparing the 1-26).
The takeoff was "challenging". Since I was being charged a fixed price for the tow to altitude I decided to get the most out of the flight and combine several takeoffs for the price of one flight. The tow hit some very turbulent air over the end of runway 34 that had me mentally running through the release-from-tow-and-180-degree-turn-for-home sequence. Fortunately the turbulence soon lessened so that some semblance of normal tow was possible.
We reached cloud base at about 3500 feet and towed up between the clouds in smooth (but quickly moving) air. I released at 5000' and played around at flying upside down for a bit until I was back in rough air and had to go about the onerous task of finding lift. Due to the high winds what lift existed was pretty skewed with altitude and broken up; but there were fractocumulus clouds forming and it was possible for a small ship to stay up. The winds aloft were quite strong - I would start circling in a 2-3 knot thermal and by the time I had gained 500 feet I was so far downwind that I would use all the altitude gained just to get back to where I started from. After a couple of repetitions this got boring and I got bold and tried heading out towards Mount Wachusetts in the hopes of finding some terrain-based lift. All I learned from that exercise was the location of sink. Another two gains of 500' coupled with drift and I had enough soaring for the day.
-Arnd.