Cleanpants here... we left early Saturday morning to go to Dunlap (way too early); we ended up having time to tour the Dunlap valley, walk the ranger station LZ, play soccer in Dan's LZ, go grocery shopping, eat at the mexican place, and still find time to wait on launch for a few hours. Robert Booth (wingman) was there and he launched early as did Dan Fleming. Dan sunked out almost immediately despite his best efforts to stay up. Robert, however, managed to stay up- barely. Not encouraged, I continued waiting a while before launching. Eventually, I get to launch and wait for things to improve, which they don't and decide to launch anyway. It turned out to be a hard day! The thermals were tiny and some were pretty strong (I went weightless a couple times falling out of the thermals). The best part of the day was near the end of the flight, when I was coming in to land. 4 gliders were in the air at the same level (Pat, clayble, Robert, and myself). We needed to get into some kind of landing pattern, and it was obvious that Robert had no intention of trying to get down. Being the highest up, I had to try to stay up to give the others time to land. So, Robert and I tried to work the weak lift above the LZ while Pat and clayable came in to land. It turned out Robert and I did this a little too well, because we both managed to climb up to ~5300'. Robert was going crazy on the radio trying to figure out who was climbing with him, but I accidentally had my volume too low to hear him. Anyway, I squandered all my altitude soon after, and had to come land anyway; I got an hour out of the day while I think Robert got close to 3 hrs.
The next day was much stronger. We ended up launching at about 1:30-2pm instead of the 3:30-4pm I had been getting used to. Lots of people launched and everyone managed to stay up. Andrea, a new mountain pilot managed to get about 1.5 hours out of the day- very impressive! Quite a few Berkeley pilots made it to Sampson (I unfortunately was not among them). K-dog decided he was bored of the Dunlap ridge and didn't want to land in cross conditions, so he XC'ed over to the pizza joint with his new glider and had a few beers. My flight wasn't particularly interesting, I got up and got low and got up, and nearly reached cloudbase (I'm now looking both down and up for thermals now). I had a 2 hr 20 min flight which was well worth the trip.
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