There are thousands of water rocket enthusiasts out there and, as you might have guessed, even a Yahoo group dedicated to the topic. I stumbled upon the group while searching for parachute ideas and thought the following story might be enjoyed by all.

...<discussion on altitude competitions>... That being said, there's another reason why I think total time aloft isn't a good measure of a rocket's performance: There's nothing to say they have to come down at all. It's a shame Robert Youens has taken a break from the list, because it's one of his rockets that pulled this off. The rocket was painted flat black, weighed in at some ridiculously low weight, and sported something like a 3' drycleaner bag parachute. It was a nice hot, sunny, almost windless Texas day when he launched. Alan Pound and I watched the launch, and figured the max altitude at something under 250'. Robert's rocket had a beautiful apogee deployment, and was under canopy with only about 50-75' of lost altitude. The rocket slowly came down to about 100' off the deck, and then started to rise. Near as we can tell it caught a thermal off the ground that carried it several hundred feet up. At that point I'm pretty sure the hot air rising off the rocket body itself (which was painted flat black, remember) started to take over. The last I saw of it it was at least a thousand feet up, over a mile away. The last I saw of Robert that day was him slamming the door on his Suburban as he tore off cross-country to try to recover the rocket. Robert lost sight of it about five miles from the launch site. It was so high at that point it couldn't be seen at all. Considering it had a 3' diameter parachute that glistened in the sun, that's pretty high. The rocket was never recovered. Time from launch to loss of the rocket was almost half an hour.

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