On Sep 20, 11:38*pm, Martin Gregorie
wrote:
On Sun, 19 Sep 2010 22:57:15 -0700, Bruce Hoult wrote:

Incidentally, someone landed their Cirrus on a suburban street here on
Sunday morning. They reportedly deliberately used the poles on either
side of a pedestrian crossing to slow down. I believe my instructors
mentioned tree trunks in this context, but whatever...

My cousin, who lives in Waikanae, said it was a turbulent, gusty day but
none of the reports mention the weather. How would you rate it?

The entire country was covered by a massive storm centered to the
south of the South Island with strong westerly conditions covering the
whole 2000 km (north/south) of the country. If you could get high
somewhere it could well have been a record-setting day. Some
supermarkets and a stadium in Southland collapsed due to the weight of
snow on them. Around Auckland and Hamilton trees were coming down and
houses losing roofs and a lot of people lost electricity. In the
middle of the North Island there were a lot of slips on to roads.

It wasn't so bad around Wellington and was, fundamentally, a fine day,
but windy. I wasn't at the club but I'd expect that it was probably
gusting over 30 knots.

Those are mostly fairly benign conditions at Paraparaumu with smooth
air coming off the ocean and on to the hills 3 or 4 km inland, and the
sea cliffs further south. The only real problem is Kapiti Island, 5
km offshore, which produces wave which can either reinforce the ridge
lift or else dump on to it, and can also generate a fair bit of rotor
in semi-random places.

Even when the wave/rotor is dumping on to the ridge, you can generally
at least keep as high as the ridge, as in this video I shot on my
phone last December:

http://youtu.be/aLCSpVL35Tk

The ridge is at 1000-1200 ft and I could manage 1800 ft or so. I could
stay up but I couldn't get high enough to go anywhere.

Then you've got to make it 3 km back to the field (near the sea,
towards the right hand end of the island in this video) which is not
very far, even in sink.