The Morning Glory Cloud 5
The Morning Glory…5
Geoff Pratt, by contrast, seems to be oblivious to these concerns. A gently-spoken electrician from Cairns, he’s just made the 15-hour drive to Burketown towing his Monerai V-Tail self-launching glider, just as he has done for the last nine years. ‘This gliding experience is totally unique,’ he says with a smile, his gold tooth glinting. ‘When I’m flying among the clouds, I feel like I’m at home. Until you actually experience what it is like to soar this cloud, you don’t really understand how special it is. Sometimes I have to pinch myself to know that I am actually doing it. It’s that amazing.’ I ask Geoff if he gets bored through the long, hot days waiting for the cloud’s rare dawn appearances. ‘Burketown’s not such a bad place to hang around in,’ he reflects. ‘I like the fact that it is so isolated. I’ll never get bored of the place.’And that evening, it begins to look like the waiting might finally be over. There has been a brisk sea breeze all day and not only are the tables in the Savannah Lodge cafe dramatically bending up at the corners, but the fridge doors in Burketown Pub are well and truly frosted. All signs point to the cloud appearing the following morning.
The gliders are out on the airstrip by the time I arrive at 5am. I help Rick Bowie wipe the dew from the wings of his Pik 20E. He explains that while it is a great sign that there is enough moisture in the air for the cloud to form, the dew also plays havoc with the dynamics of the glider wings’ aerofoil. Paul Poole has come to the airstrip too to fly me in his Cessna 187 motor-plane so I can get a look at the cloud from the air. ‘There’s definitely one out there,’ he says looking to the horizon, and as soon as it is light enough to fly, the gliders rush to their planes, and take off towards the rising sun, with Paul and me in hot pursuit. Thirty miles north of the town we reach the Gulf of Carpentaria. And there, rolling in towards us are not one but three Morning Glory clouds in a row. The front one has a silky smooth surface, making it look like an enormous snowy glacier, suspended 500ft above the ground. The secondary and tertiary clouds are rough and puffy, propagating in the turbulent wake of the first. From the air, it is possible to see the enormous reach of the cloud crests, snaking out along the Gulf in both directions. The gliders’ planes look tiny as they soar along the leading edge of the primary cloud and then they climb over the top of it to ride the second and third waves of air. The planes’ wings catch glints of the low morning sun, as the pilots perform banks and manoeuvres. I marvel at what it must have been like to be the first person to do this; to have gone up and surfed this cloud before anyone else had even determined that it was possible.
Russell White is one of the only two people in the world who is in a position to tell me. He is clearly a legend among the Morning Glory chasers, for it was after his pioneering flight that he made on this cloud with his gliding partner, Rob Thompson, back in 1989, that the whole craze for soaring the Morning Glory began. They had flown up to the Great Barrier Reef from Sydney to spend a few days sailing when the skipper told them about this huge cloud. With a lot of experience gliding on the stationary waves of air that form in the lee of hills and mountains, both men felt convinced that this moving cloud had the potential for a fantastic gliding experience. They resolved there and then to fly to Burketown the following day in White’s Grob 109 motor-glider to see if they could find it.
‘We arrived late in the afternoon of October 12,’ White tells me on the phone from his home in Byron Bay. When they awoke the next morning Thompson went outside to have a look over the horizon and came racing back a few moments later and dragged White out of the shower, shouting ‘It’s coming!’ They hitched a lift out to the airfield in a desperate hurry, and were taxiing down the airstrip almost underneath the advancing cloud. It was directly behind them as they took off. This being the first time anyone had attempted to soar on this cloud, they had to make up the rules as they went along. ‘We turned, were in the lift at well below 1,000ft, and off we went,’ he tells me. ‘We had the most remarkable flight. We were awe-struck and ecstatic – completely over the moon that we’d actually found this thing and were flying on it. It was just outstanding.’ This was a comparatively small Morning Glory – only some 30 miles long and 3,000ft high. ‘But we were awe-struck by the size and power of the thing,’ White enthuses. The pioneering hour-and-a-half flight left them completely hooked. On their way back down south, they stopped off at Lake Keepit in New South Wales, home to one of the largest gliding clubs in the country, where they announced to all and sundry that they’d just flown the Morning Glory. ‘They didn’t believe us,’ laughs White. ‘Seriously, they didn’t believe us – they thought we were making it all up. So we went back the following year with cameras.’
Through White’s articles in the gliding press, and a short documentary Thompson subsequently filmed, word spread and others began to make the long journey to Burketown each September and October in search of this phenomenal gliding experience. And yet to this day, White estimates that those who have actually flown on the cloud number only a few dozen. I ask if he is proud of what he has started. ‘I’m pleased as punch,’ he replies. ‘Could you describe the Himalayas to somebody who hasn’t seen them and do them justice? There are zillions of photographs of them, but do any of those do them justice? It’s the same with the Morning Glory. It’s an awesome experience, but you just have to be there to get it.’
At the Savannah Lodge, I declare my interest in clouds to the pilots gathered for dinner. Before I left London, I founded the Cloud Appreciation Society, with a view to championing the beauty and wonder of clouds in a nation where I feel they are unjustly maligned. Since I’ve given him a membership badge, Paul Poole seems to have rather taken to the idea of the society, and comes home from his charter flights between the neighbouring townships saying he needs more badges, as he is recruiting members by the dozen. So on my last night, I hand him a page I’ve knocked out on Amanda’s computer that certifies him as head of the Australian branch of the Cloud Appreciation Society, henceforth to be based in Burketown. I can’t think of a better place to locate it – in an eccentric, tiny town, off the beaten track, quietly basking in shadow of the most amazing cloud in the world.
Gavin Pretor-Pinney presents the Certificate of Inauguration for the Cloud Appreciation Society’s Australian Branch to Paul Poole in The Burketown Pub
This article first appeared in the Daily Telegraph Saturday Magazine
© Gavin Pretor-Pinney, 2004
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Movies of the Morning Glory Cloud
