Day 2 at Ephrata - Dust Devils and Convergence

Well day 2 has come and gone - strong winds straight off the plateau at 90 degrees to the runway made it doubtful we would get a day. Prior to launch a huge dust devil raced through the tiedown area and trashed all our stuff. We had a bucket last seen at 1000ft and all the cleaning cloths and polish gone without trace. My heavy duty canopy cover in its bag got dragged right out onto the runway. They launched us soon after and it all came good. Over here there is a 5 mile radius start area with a max altitude. You can start out the side of the cylinder or out the top. Today I wanted to start out the top in order to get a longer downwind first leg, and I just managed to scrape above 8000ft to achieve that. The first leg was mostly in the blue but there was an intriguing cloud street running crosswind way off in the distance. I decided to push deep into the first area and try to connect with it, hoping it would line up with the second leg. Fortunately my cunning plan worked and I found good lift. The second leg was mainly dolphining along near base, in what turned out to be a convergence between the hot westerly and the outflow from a line of storms to the east. There was the odd classic convergence dags which regularly worked. The orientation of the circles allowed me to run back along the same line on the 3rd leg until I had about 1.5 miles per minute left to run. At that point I turned for home and needed just one climb to 10500 to get onto final glide into wind. The glide was pretty uneventful and I got in just above the 1000ft regulation finish height. I think. The scores will tell.

Here's the only shot I took today - pre-start - of the airfield from about 7500ft.