The Morning Glory…4
The number of pilots in the world that have surfed the Morning Glory amounts only a few dozen
Five days after I have arrived in Burketown, and on the morning that Jelleff heads out of town, my luck changes. Looking out of my bedroom window at 5am I catch sight of a dark line on the horizon. I’ve heard enough about this cloud now to know this is it. I fumble into my clothes and rush out on to the empty road in front of my cabin. It is still dark, and a dog is barking manically, as this amazing spectacle approaches. I can feel the wind picking up around me, as the cloud reaches the end of the street, just like Frankie Wylie in the pub said it would. The light from the full moon lends a silky, glacial sheen to the towering front of the cloud, which stretches off to the horizon in both directions. I stand transfixed as the Morning Glory makes its way down the street, at something a little over the town’s driving speed limit. Its base must be only 1,000ft above the ground, while the top of the roll appears to be about half a mile up. Ripples and undulations on its front face rise up and disappear over the top as it moves, giving it the appearance of revolving back on itself. I can’t get over the immensity of it, blocking out the moon and the Southern Cross as it passes over, casting the town into shadow. The back of the roll looks quite different from the front - a falling, cumulus-like wall of puffy cauliflower mounds. The cloud that I have crossed the world to see has finally come, and yet it is still dark and so only partially visible. I feel like I have come to hunt an infamous shark and have just seen its fin break the surface of the water. Walking back to my cabin for a cup of coffee, I cannot wait to see what this enormous beast will look like in the full light of day.
More gliders have arrived at the airstrip. Rick Bowie has come the 1,200 miles from Byron Bay, where he operates joy flights for the local gliding club. This is his third year in Burketown. He’s brought a self-launching Pik 20E glider, which has a two-stroke engine attached to a retractable arm that he uses to get him up in the air and then winds down into a hatch in the plane’s fuselage as he starts gliding. ‘If you’re on a wave with good lift,’ he explains, ‘you can really go. I can get up to 8,000ft on a 4,000ft wave and reach speeds of 160mph.’ And the same dependable lift at the front of the cloud makes for perfect conditions to perform the most adventurous gliding manoeuvres. ‘You come over the face of the cloud and surf down it,’ says Bowie. ‘You can have a wing tip in the cloud and go right along the face, right down to the bottom edge. You can do aerobatics, loops. It provides quite amazing flying conditions for a glider.’ But he introduces some words of warning: ‘You have to treat flying this rolling wave with much caution, because you just don’t know what it’s going to do. The lift can disappear as it comes across land from the Gulf and the cloud dissipates.’ The turbulent sinking air, in the centre and to the rear of the cloud, is to be avoided at all costs. When you ‘wipe-out’ surfing on an average ocean wave you get wet. If you do the same cloud surfing at 4,000ft, you might not survive. ‘It’s isolated country out here,’ warns Bowie, ‘and full of crocodiles. If you have to use your parachute, no one’s going to come and get you in a hurry.’
In spite of its dangers, the Morning Glory gives gliders the opportunity to reach record speeds and distances. One of the others out at the airstrip in Burketown for the first time is Dave Jansen, a Qantas pilot from Mooloolaba, north of Brisbane. He clearly approaches flying with the responsibility of someone who pilots jumbos between Australia and Los Angeles. But Jansen also knows more than anyone about breaking records, as he has been the Australian national gliding champion five times and is the records officer for the Gliding Federation, which means he is the man who verifies any of the national record claims. ‘There is one particular distance record that you could beat here,’ he tells me. ‘It is a flight that would take about 11 hours. It is only a matter of time before someone does it on the Morning Glory.’ Jansen is here with three other gliders, who are based at Lake Keepit Soaring Club in New South Wales and have brought an ASH 25 glider with an enormous 87ft wing span. Whilst he is clearly aware of the record-breaking potential of surfing this cloud, this year he and his companion pilots are not going to make an official attempt. ‘I just came for the ride this time,’ he says, ‘but I’d consider coming back next year with these guys to try to break the record seriously.’ I ask Dave why, if records can be broken on this cloud, there is no more than a handful of pilots here to soar it. He takes no time to give his answer. ‘It’s a bloody long way to come. There’s nothing here. It’s hot, it’s isolated and there are millions of flies.’
