Thanks Jim - its kind of fun to approach iconic scenes like Thor's Well from the ocean point of view looking back at the land since that's not how we are used to seeing them
Thanks Michael - I took the shot and only barely recognize where this was from to be honest. That's the fun part about hovering with a telephoto lens.
Thanks - water and gravity can offer up some delightful visuals.
Thanks Jameel - it's a bit of a crap shoot for the swells and the wind. I have been there several times with my MP3 where the drone stayed in its bag because the wind was way too strong but every once in a while you get good swells and low winds. I have dropped by this place almost a dozen times since I started flying and got good flying conditions about 50% of the time.
Thanks Tim - I don't carry an anemometer with me when I go out to fly (@Beth does) so its strictly seat of my pants but winds that would have a flag straight out would give me pause. I have flown in winds around 25-30mph with some higher gusts that gave me wind warnings on the controller screen strongly advising me to get my drone out of the sky. I do watch the attitude box down in the corner of the controller screen and when I can see that the drone is hovering at angles in the 15-20º range its likely going to impact your images and you are very close to getting warnings. Top speed on my Mavic 3 Pro is 42mph in Sport mode so flying into that as a headwind won't work too well. Beth has to fly in conditions like that for her job but she isn't risking her personal drone in those conditions.
as alan said, i've used an anemometer to measure wind speed on the ground. but usually we just use a weather service like noaa or windy to look at the sustained wind speeds and the gusts. i've flown in gusts around 50 mph after a tornado, that's not fun. in those cases you pretty much just stop the drone when the gusts get too bad and let it hover (or drift whatever way it gets blown) and get it back on track after the gust dies down. or, if possible, you can land and hope you can get it back in the air again. when i was flying after a tornado, so landing wasn't a great option due to all of the debris and power lines down. the bigger and/or newer drones can take more wind than the smaller or older ones.
There are resources you can use to get an idea of what is going on near you. One of the best I have seen is a site set up for wind surfers. They have been quite resourceful in finding home weather stations with online data they can harvest for wind conditions. I have a home station and they asked me if they could use my site as a data point and I grabbed their web site info so I could use it for places I want to go fly. Always worth noting that the air speed on the ground isn't necessarily the same as what you will experience when you are a couple hundred feet above the ground - its usually quite a bit higher once you get above obstacles on the ground that slow the wind down.
