Judith’s blog

Geoff writes: I spent the morning sorting out issues around Corndon, doing some club work. This took me longer than I expected, and involved visiting a horse breeder underneath Corndon. Judith and David worked on another webcast, this time on thermalling.

Although very cloudy, we thought it was flyable, but a bit too northerly for the Long Mynd. People were flying there, but not doing very well, so we went to the Lawley, which was more or less bang on, and, in spite of the cloud, we had a good day. David and I went XC, though not very far, around 15km, with a very low base. (Graeme also did a short XC before we arrived). Judith was still a bit ill, she flew but didn’t want to get too high because being a bit bunged up, the pressure hurt her ears. So she landed and retrieved us.

As we got back to the Lawley, after two pubs and some food, Dave JH and Steve Dean had just landed, having flown for some hours. So the Lawley was definitely the place to be in this area. We saw Rich when driving back over the Long Mynd, and he had struggled to get a couple of hundred above launch; and Nigel Lasseter in his sailplane had worried about having to bottom  land.

See photos of today.

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Geoff writes: yet another windy day. OK for hang gliders a the Long Mynd, but not paragliders, unless you arrived very early in the morning, as some people apparently did. Rather than me fly my hang glider, we decided to have a day off, and went first to do some archery shooting, then to visit a National Trust house, Dudmaston Hall. This was really nice, with a few rooms of the house open – but most of them not – and some lovely grounds to walk in. It’s famous for its art collections, including some modern art (something we are less than excited about). It’s now owned by the National Trust, but the family still lives there, apparently.

There was also a demonstration of what happens when you combine coke and Mentos mints. The guy demonstrating it gave out instructions to all the kids there – which I’m sure will really please their parents when they try it in the living room.

You can also see a nice video (but crap music) of some guys that really took this seriously!

See photos of today.

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Geoff writes: windy most of the day, very cloudy early on, but gradually clearing. After working in the morning, I went to help clear up after the archery competition, then flew the paraglider in the evening. It was pretty windy, but seemed to be dropping. I flew for a while, then when I decided to top land, the wind seemed to be picking up a lot, so I eventually went down to the bottom landing, as did Graeme. After being retrieved by Wayne, it seemed it had picked up on top, gusting at one point to 27mph. A couple of others stayed in the air, flying,  I guess, till it dropped and they could top land. Not an XC day- and in fact, none posted in the league for anywhere in the country. July really is pretty rubbish, after an excellent first part of the year.

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I felt a lot worse today, so slept late, and then felt woozy, full of cold and head-achy all day. I tried to do some productive stuff, but other than small jobs, like putting up the triangle podcast, I didn’t really feel capable. What I did manage to finally do, is pull some proper statistics down from our server. The stats we get from the blog wildly underestimate the actual numbers, so for example, we get the figures for the hits to the podcast page, but not the downloads of the actual files. So one hit may be 22 downloads (because there’s 22 podcasts now). While we thought we had just passed 12,000 hits mark for the podcasts, in fact, there have been 21,601 podcast downloads from our site. And this figure is not accurate either, because I can only get stats for the top 100 pages in a year, so it misses out on a substantial number. There’s also the direct downloads through RSS and iTunes, which we can’t get stats on. So it was nice to see the work on the podcasts is worth it, since they are clearly quite popular!

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Flying Triangles with Kai Coleman. After achieving huge open-distance XC flights in the UK, Kai started turning his attention to triangle flying and has done so successfully for the last few years. In this podcast, Kai talks about his experience of flying triangles and gives some advice on planning, GPS use and just going for it! See Kai’s triangle flight from the Wrekin and Graham Steel’s flight from XClent. 23 minutes.

Download the podcast: http://www.judithmole.net/podcasts/triangles.mp3

Subscribe to future podcasts: see the links on the right.

Please note: this, and all previous podcasts, are also available from the podcast page.

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Geoff writes: we were very optimistic about today, until we woke up and checked the latest forecast, which was rapidly getting worse. In the end, it was flyable all day at the Mynd, very low base, wave affected, top end winds, and no-one at all went XC, though on the plus side it was more or less flyable all day. The day had its amusing sides, with, amongst other things, a hang glider pilot choosing to land in the sail plane field – a definite no-no. And one or two other trivial events, not worth mentioning. You had to be there. Overall, though, a bit disappointing. Judith was still feeling ill, full of a cold, and didn’t fly.

See photos of today.

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Geoff writes: a poor forecast here, better further east, but it all depended on the timing of the front, which would switch off the XC potential. SW, and definitely no chance here. We did consider going to the Peaks, but spoke to Kai early on, and he said the front had already arrived at his place, only 40km or so from the Peaks, so we decided it was moving in too fast, and gave it a miss. A bad mistake, since most of the Derbyshire Soaring Club’s 500 or so members seem to have gone XC today, with numerous 100km+ flights. I don’t want to look at the League….

Instead, we messed around at home for a while, then went to watch the archery competition, arriving just as it finished for the day. More bad timing! We sat around at the field, had some tea, chatted to Martyn from Northumberland, another archer and pilot, and came home.

Judith wasn’t feeling that well, so I went on my own to the Bridges in the evening, where they were having an all day music festival, which was brilliant as ever. A real shame she couldn’t come.

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