With a week planned in Annecy, but the weather looking fairly unstable, we decided to head down a day early so that I could fly on the best day of the week. It was certainly a good decision, but it was still not a flying day due to late afternoon storms and a slow start to the day.
I met a group of English speaking friends at the landing site, who I ended up spending most of the morning with on launch while we waited for it to turn on, which made it a pretty social day.
When I took if it quickly became apparent that it was not going to be a big XC day, but rather a good day to get to know the site and admire the, frankly magnificent, views. The flying was pretty rough when above the lower inversion layer, with strong thermals, wind shear and another layer above that. Nonetheless it was a really enjoyable flight and it was great to have a flight without any big xc pressure.
As the day went on the thunderstorms were clearly building, but I managed to squeeze in a trip to the end of the lake and back which was a nice bonus. I landed and met up with the group I had spent the morning with, where we enjoyed a nice beer while pondering why there were people still in the sky, or more to the point, still taking off.
Unsurprisingly the thunderstorm bit, and it appeared to involve two storms merging and was pretty violent. This wouldn’t have been an issue but there were lots of pilots still in the air, we saw one get sucked up into the cloud, lots of people struggling to get down and bailing downwind. Based on the news a few days later, it appears everyone was ok, with two people being rescued from the lake and one with injuries having landed on a roof. We were baffled why people were not landing, as the storm was very visible and slow moving, and while it was worse than forecast, it was definitely forecast on the day.
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