Morning glory cloud diary

Here is an article I wrote for various magazines about the morning glory clouds, and my experience photographing them. I’ve illustrated it with some of the supplementary photos I took  while in the Gulf country waiting and hoping nature would co-operate with my ambition to capture them.

When it comes to big waves, most of us reserve a special kind of awe for those leading watermen who seek out and ride the world’s mightiest moving mountains – waves such as Waimea Bay, Mavericks and Jaws.

But for all their awesome efforts, those dedicated to snaring the the world’s biggest ocean waves may just be outdone by a bunch of aviators. Turns out that the real big wave surfers can be found in Australia’s outback, higher than kites and taking off on some little known but indisputably ENORMOUS waves.

The difference is that these waves aren’t in water – they’re made of moving air. They are still waves, however, and they still pack an almighty punch. In fact, they act in the same way as waves in the ocean do because the atmosphere obeys the same laws of fluid dynamics.

So of course, going by the dictum that no great wave should go unsurfed, there really is a group of intrepid, pioneering hardcore glider pilots who wait around for weeks on end until conditions are right to tackle these monsters head on.

To find these uber-waves you’ll need to go to a very remote part of Northern Australia – the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is the only place in the world where this phenomenon – known locally as the Morning Glory – occurs with any predictability.

On these unique clouds the gliders aren’t – as they usually would be – dependant on random thermals to stay aloft. The giant suck of air rising up the front of the wave provides all the energy they need and offers them a steep, invisible wave face where drop-in speeds can reach up to 160mph, and all kinds of crazy surf-style manoeuvres can be performed.

“You come over the the face of the cloud and streak down it,” recounts Rick Bowie, a sky surfing pilot from Byron Bay, “maybe dipping into the cloud all the way to the bottom, and then just arcing up into a full loop. You can just soar on and on for an hour or more, doing acrobatics, anything you want. Meanwhile the sight of this wave shaped cloud and its outrageous size is just blowing you away.”

Rick Bowie with his glider.

The glider pilots share the bravado of their big wave water cousins because the potential disaster is equally real – the dynamics of the wave cloud make wipe-outs a possibility. That tremendous upift at the front of the cloud is matched by an equally powerful downdraft at the back. Blundering into it is may be terminal for a motorised craft, and certainly so for a glider.

It is the same as going “over the falls” on a big wave. “When you wipe out on an average ocean wave you get wet,” says Rick, who takes tourists on glider flights in his home town of Byron Bay, NSW. “If you do the same cloud surfing at 4000 feet, you may not survive.” Another difference is that surfers, unlike these pilots, don’t need to pack a parachute. Bowie doesn’t ever want to use his: “This is isolated country, full of crocodiles, and if you have to ditch, no-one is going to come and get you in a hurry” Rick warns.”

Just as surfers scan weather charts for fortuitous low-pressure systems to stir up the ocean surface, cloud surfers also scan charts for the particular patterns that can lead to the formation of these atmospheric waves.

The principles behind Morning Glories are similar to those that form ocean waves – you need turmoil in the air. This combines with the unique geography of the region to occasionally produce, mainly in September and October, the sought after clouds. No one is precisely sure, but it is thought that that they form when powerful sea breezes from the Coral Sea and the Gulf waters collide over the hot landmass of Cape York. This sets up giant shock waves that travel through the night towards the southern Gulf shores. If there is sufficient humidity for a cloud to form, the waves become visible, and by dawn they loom out of the sunrise.

The humid air cools as it is forced up the front of the wave and condenses into cloud. On the descending edge the cloud evapourates, so that the whole enormous thing – which may be up to 1000 kilometres long – rotates slowly and majestically backwards as it travels forward at tsunami speeds. The Glories run into early morning virgin air, which means that the cloud is always smoothly sculptured. In this sense, they are like a glassy wave, which is as special to a glider as it is to an ocean surfer.

An horizon spanning cloud crosses the coast near the mouth of the Albert river.

Ken Jellef taps into these huge forces using a fragile microlight, meaning he’s completely exposed and can feel on his body the the same air currents that his tiny craft responds to. “Despite the forces that are at work as this wave rolls along, the air that you are gliding through is as clear as crystal,” says Ken, a timber merchant from Melbourne who drives to Burketown annually with his micro-light. “It is a form of gliding that is exactly like surfing. When you’re on the Morning Glory, you are truly surfing a cloud.”

Ken attaching a camera to the wing of his micro-light.

His complete exposure to the wild elements of the sky and his unparalleled views while on the cloud inspire him to lyricism: “When you look at that enormous flowing wave, with the golden sun breaking behind it, it looks like something the Italians would have painted in the Renaissance. You’d swear you were in heaven. It’s that good.”

Secondary clouds in the primaries more turbulant wake may line up in a set of 10 or more, corduroyed to the horizon. In these conditions the gliders jump from wave to wave, drawing complex lines through the sky and using the miles of upward-rushing air to perform graceful, radical manoeuvres.

From my position in a Cessna, with the passenger door removed for clear photography, the view of the clouds and the streaking gliders was also blowing me away. I had made the expedition to Burketown in the hope that nature would co-operate in my quest to capture these events on film (most of it on a Mamiya 6x7cm rangefinder for maximum resolution.) I knew there was no certainty of that. Sometimes the glider guys sit waiting here for weeks.

The verandah of the Burketown Hotel was some shelter against the usually hot and glarey Gulf sun.

A hawk flies over the pub’s roof while surveying for food and prey.

There isn’t too much to see on the road leaving Burketown, so hopefully the cow hazard would be avoidable!

Isolated Burktown on the banks of the Albert river.

Waiting still with patience and hope (and many a referral to  bureau of meteorology printouts) we sought further aid in the form of Dawn Naranachil while on a brief trip to nearby Bentink Island.  She performed the Morning Glory dance for us, informing us that it rarely failed to bring the clouds!

Her dance might even have worked. Because on the third and fourth nights of my visit, cloudless Glories – lacking the atmospheric humidity to become visible – swept over in the pre-dawn darkness. The sudden flurries of wind out of the still night woke me, and helped by my foggy state, had a definite mysterious quality to them. On the fifth day, a fully visible Glory boiled over by moonlight at 5am. It advanced from the north-east, massive and gloomy, rotating back on itself with a slow, stately monumnetal progress. I stood in Burketown’s main street among powerful wind gusts and deepening gloom as the cylindrical cloud rolled overhead to the howl of a town dog. Soon though, the stars blinked out again, and the moon re-appeared to shine on the revolving rim of the Glory as it passed over the town and rolled silently into the savannah.

The first cloud I saw rolls away over the townscape.

And my luck held. The cloud gods were literally on a roll. For the next three mornings they arrived in the visible dawn and along with the gliders, we went aloft to meet them.

A glory cloud looms on the horizon as the pilots hastily prepare their craft to meet it.

The retractable propellor on a glider fires up as the pilots ready for take off.

On the ground waiting for radio reports from the glider pilots.

It was my pilot’s first time on a Morning Glory and I knew he was keen to sample their power. But as we flew along the preciptous frontal wall of the cloud, he stunned me by switching the Cessna’s engine off. In the eerie silence that followed, the clunky craft still kept its  altitude in the uplift. While the pilot was loving this, the silent engine did nothing for my nerves, already on edge from the proximity and power of this vast force we were flying on.I was glad when he decided, eventually, to kick-start the engine again!

It was hard to co-ordinate shooting the cloud and the gliders, and there was a natural time limit to do it. After an hour the tropical sun evapourates the cloud, although the wave itself – now invisible – continues on, and the gliders call it a day. But since we’re all in swift motion – my piloted Cessna, the gliders and the cloud – I had to anticipate spots well ahead in the sky where everything would come together in my frame. It was like playing three dimensional pool three moves ahead, at high speed.

The leading cloud smoothed as it advances in the quiet air of dawn.

As tough as it was to get these, the first professional still images of this phenomenon, my groundwork had really all been laid by the glider pilots. At first, no one knew if it was safe – or even possible – to fly on these clouds.

The first cloud ride took place in 1989, when Russell Whiite, along with his gliding partner Rob Thompson, made the first flight. They’d heard of the cloud from a sailing skipper while holidaying in Queensland and resolved there and then to fly to Burketown to see for themselves. Their pioneering flight that year was met, on return, with disbelief among the gliding fraternity, so the next year they took pictures from the cockpit to prove it.

White is drawn back to Burketown annually from his home in Byron Bay. His demeanor is just like a surfer as he tries to describe the spectacle, comparing it to witnessing the Himalayas: “Could you describe the Himalayas to someone who hasn’t seen them and do them justice? It’s the same with the Morning Glory. You have to be there – you have to be up on it – to really get it.”