Another Cherokee II Landout

Its been a slow summer I know, not much as far as flight reports. Had
a good short flight today. about 40 minutes total. 20 of that was
spent loitering around 1000-1500 AGL praying for a good thermal to
come. It didnt. Here's the report as reported elsewhe

forecasts for today were looking soarable, although perhaps a little
marginal due to winds out of the southeast. I launched about 1 PM
after the CAP glider had gone up and reported a little lift. My tow
went fairly quickly, there was definitely a lot of lift up there. I
managed to core a decent 300ish fpm thermal and got up to around 3000
AGL. I figured if i could find a thermal there i could there must be
others so i set out downwind, to the northwest. i worked cloud to
cloud over town and lost very little altitude. in fact over 7 or 8
miles i barely lost 500 feet. I knew from previous experience that on
a day like this its very foolish to get low, plus i wasnt seeing a lot
of open fields out in front of me so i worked on finding lift around
my area. i found a few scraps here and there but kept creeping lower
and lower. I had a cow pasture and a couple of baled hay fields under
me.

I kept creeping down, and of course had a smaller and smaller radius
of action to work in in order to keep my fields as options. I entered
downwind to land and of course found a thermal and managed to start
climbing! hoo rah i thought, I may be able to save this. I climbed a
whopping 500 feet before losing the thermal. Wind was really breaking
things up making it very difficult to work. I scratched around the
area a little more but finally had to give it up and land. The pasture
looked pretty nice from the air, a bit of a slope from left to right
and a few hay bales. trees on the approach and departure ends. looked
like enough room to get down and stopped though, particularly with the
headwind on final.

coming in over the trees was a little nerve wracking as i just kept
waiting for the hand of god to come down and smack me into them.
cleared them by a fair margin and then did a full slip with airbrakes
out to get touched down as early as possible. once down it was obvious
i would easily stop so i let it roll as long as possible. turns out
the pasture was right next to a friends farm and they were out
working, so got to say hi. always nice to see a friendly face on a
landout. my favorite picture so far is attached, Matt got some great
pictures of me on the hay bale that i cant wait to see.

my pictures are posted at picasaweb.google.com/cherokee373y/landouts
and are labeled "NW Ames" Hopefully matt will post a link to his, he
got some great shots.

I think I made it about 8 or 10 miles.