Monday dawns full of promise. I gulp down my coffee, zip out to the Rockton Aerodrome in Rockton, Ontario, grab a plane from the Southern Ontario Soaring Association, and head out on a 300-km adventure. The thermals are bad and the wind is strong. I fight my way to York Soaring, our sister club 60 km north, all the while watching a huge thunderstorm blossom to the west. It’s well downwind and not a danger, but very impressive. From York the sky north doesn’t look good, so I abandon the task and zip back to SOSA, then south to see if the Lake Erie convergence line is working. It is kicking up three big storms near the shoreline. No point in getting involved with those. I come back, get in a bit of a hole when the big cumulus cloud I’m working drifts into the Hamilton control zone and I have to abandon it. I manage to dig myself out, take a nice thermal street up to Cambridge and back while the cloud I’d abandoned at Hamilton moves on to rain on Waterdown. It backdrops the jets sequenced to Runway 6R at Toronto, always a pretty sight. Back on the ground I get a text from Gabrielle: “Call when you can, Eric saw a thunderstorm and is worried about you.” I call and reassure them both that I am not going anywhere near a storm, not now and not ever.
Tuesday morning. Wake up, coffee, out to the field. Paul greets me with “How’s the thunderstorm expert?” I look at him blankly. “You did 200 kilometres between all those Cbs yesterday,” he says.
