Judith's blog

It was flyable early on today, but we had a job to do first… fix the satellite dish that was blown out of alignment in the storms of Monday. I’m not TV fan, and have resisted having the damn thing in the house, but Geoff’s very partial to watching the news. The only channel we could get after the storm was BBC News 24, but it turns out that Geoff is partial to more than just news, so it had to be fixed and that meant going on the roof. After our last little roof adventure, we approached this with some trepidation.

We live in a three story house, with a staggered roof that is 9m high on the street side. On the other side is a 10m drop onto the balcony and under that is a 100m cliff, so a long, long fall if you slip. When we had the house restored, the builders had to replace the roof and hated working here. I didn’t blame them.

Getting onto our roof, which has a big overhang, means climbing onto our little old lady neighbour’s roof and then stepping across. We were trying to sneak up there quietly, so she wouldn’t come out and complain. She’s a lovely lady, or at least we think she is, because generally we don’t have a clue what she’s saying. She’s from Andalucia, and apart from speaking Spanish with the equivalent of a Geordie accent, she also mumbles. My strategy for years has been to smile and nod and I am sure I’ve managed to offend her many times by making the wrong facial expression in response to some tragic story she’s been telling me at length. To be fair, we’re not the only ones… my parents also can’t understand her and neither can our other neighbours and they’re Catalans.

So we’re trying to quietly assemble a 8.5m ladder (no mean feat even when you don’t mind making noise), when our other neighbour pokes his head out of the window to see what’s going on. Since the road outside our house slopes, we had to find a way of stabilising the ladder, but alas, we had a clearout last week and threw all the old off-cuts of wood away. Our neighbour saw this as a challenge and mobilised the neighbourhood to get the right thickness of wedge for the job. Despite health and safety being a little known concept here, he insisted on checking it all out with a spirit level and helping me hold the ladder. He seemed to be enjoying himself immensely and would have stood there holding the ladder for hours if I hadn’t said that Geoff would be up there for a while.

The roof was still slippy from the dew, so Geoff was nervous and I could hear that in his voice from on the radio. He was initially just going to go up to do a temporary fix, but once there realised that, with a few tools, he could probably fix it permanently. Unfortunately, he hadn’t taken any tools with him, so we had to find a way to get a rope up to him without me having to climb the ladder. So off to the neighbour again, who climbed up to his attic and threw the rope across to Geoff and then he lowered it for me to fill rucksacks with spanners, etc. By this time the old lady next door had cottoned on that there was something interesting going on and I was a captive audience, since I couldn’t move far away, with Geoff being on the roof. Trouble was, I normally get about 10% of what she says, but without her teeth in, I get 0%. So I had two neighbours giving me advice/fretting about their roof in one ear and Geoff shouting instructions to me in the other. Arrgghh.

He fixed the alignment and then I heard the fateful message: “I’ve tightened everything, but that’s broken the u-bolt fixing the pole to the wall. You’ll have to go to Olot to get another while I wait, otherwise it will fall over and break the other fixing”. Two separate trips to Olot, lots of hauling up and down and endless unintelligible ear-bending later, Geoff was safely back on the ground! So much for sneaking up the roof.

Geoff had spent nearly three hours stuck on the roof and by this time it was too late to go flying as the wind had picked up. So a reward lunch in Besalu and then some more work. Front is going through tonight, so with any luck it will be nice tomorrow and the correfoc is on.

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The rain today reached biblical proportions. We no longer have a river outside the house, but a torrent. You can’t see the weirs any more and the river is about sixteen times the width it normally is. It’s not reached the bottom of the cliff yet, but if it rains hard tonight and tomorrow, it might yet.

So some work and then another lunch with my parents. Geoff only does restaurant lunch once a year, so he didn’t come and missed profiteroles to die for.

I went to the post office in Olot on the way. Going to the post office is something of a saga in our village. It’s only open weekdays until 10am. We used to lovingly call it the post hovel, because it was just a hole in the wall. Our local postie only delivers once a week and he’s the most disorganised public official I’ve ever seen. His desk is so full of junk that it normally takes him ages to locate the scales to weigh our letters. He never has change and often has to either ask other customers or pay us in stamps – when he has any. He usually runs out, so has to take our letters to Olot. It’s actually rather charming. With the rain this morning, I couldn’t face walking to the post office but going to Olot felt like sneaking off for an illicit liaison – I hope the postie doesn’t find out we went elsewhere.

Later in the afternoon we watched Blue Peter and finally saw the epidsode we watched being filmed on the Mynd with Judy Leden and the peregrine falcon. We even saw ourselves in it, but blink and you miss us. It’s available to view online for a week.

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The forecast was atrocious (both in terms of weather and accuracy), but very educational. They predicted cloud, rain, then storms, with possible tornados and the odd ‘mànega’, which I have now learned is a funnel cloud. Later still there would be rain with ‘fang’, which literally means mud. We were a bit stumped by what this could mean, until I asked my multilingual mum who explained that it was Sahara dust that was being sucked up and blown over, which the Catalans term ‘it’s raining mud’. In the event it didn’t rain a drop during the day and there were patches of blue sky throughout the daylight hours. Marc would have gone flying if others had been out, but we expected it to get worse at any time, so didn’t even bother considering flying/walking/cycling. Bloody forecasters!

So we worked some more on the conferences, LMSC stuff and prep for the next webcast. We had lovely dinner at Marc and Isabel’s and met their new son Sergi, who is gorgeous.

The drink driving laws have been tightened up here and since there are millions of different police forces you have to be careful. Geoff had never been breathalysed in 40 years of driving until he was twice here last winter. As we were driving home last night I commented that I had only seen road blocks when it was dry and you didn’t see many Mossos (the Catalan police force) standing around in the rain at night. Two minutes later… we hit a road block. Luckily, the person waving people through was a paragliding friend of ours who cheered us on with a hearty “Adéu, Geoff!”. So much for my daft theories.

At night the spectacular thunderstorms arrived. Some of the thunder claps actually shook the house and I worried that the washing might be blown away on the terrace.

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It poured in the night, but come this morning the sky was blue. [Note to self: believe the synoptic – not Meteocat.] I did wonder yesterday, since the front was supposed to have cleared us by lunch time. No matter, it was howling. We had arranged to go for lunch with my parents and it was lovely to see them and catch up on news. By the time we got back it was probably flyable, but we have work to do and the forecast for the next few days looks really good, so we’re working forward to be able to take the time off. Flying tomorrow I hope.

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Geoff writes: Judith was at a family event today (and tomorrow) in Essex. I did consider going, but we have a big meeting Tuesday morning, and I need at least one full day of working before that, so didn’t go.

For the flying, it was good for hang gliders, bad for paragliders. I still would like to do a long PG flight for the league, so hoped it would be ok today, even though the forecast was fairly strong. Specifically, I hoped that, with a NW forecast, Long Mountain – which takes strong winds – would be ok. In the event, first thing it was west, so I went up to the Mynd, but it was too strong, and a bit off to the north. I, and a few others, then went to Long Mountain, where the wind strength was fine, but too far west. In fact, it never went NW at any point throughout the day. So we duly went back to the Mynd, where it was on, but still too strong, though dropping. It seemed like it would probably drop enough by around 4.00, for at least the chance of an XC. RASP in the morning had given it weak thermals, but the sky seemed a lot better than that, and some hang gliders had gone XC, so it was worth sticking with the PG.

Rather than drop off more, though, it picked up. It could have been wave influenced, with the wave going in and out of phase. Lulls, where it was easily launchable, then suddenly picking up again. In the end, around 5.30 or so, I did launch, and it was fine – until suddenly I started going up rapidly, and became stationary. I eventually, and very slowly, managed to push out and lose height, went back to land, and promptly got blown back, landing going backwards. And that was enough excitement for me for the day. And a lot of wave bars had appeared by then, in the distance.

For the hang gliders, in spite of earlier reports that they were in convergence above Cheltenham, it wasn’t quite that good. The furthest was 90 km or so (as far as I know), with others down at around 55km. But I would have been happy with either of those!

Judith writes: I drove down to Colchester to meet my parents, sis and family, at my cousin’s (gorgeous) house. From there we went to Upminster to celebrate my aunt and uncle’s 40th wedding anniversary. I haven’t seen some of my family for a few years and it was nice to catch up. Nice food and plenty of bubbly later we headed back to Colchester.

See photos of today.

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Today was open day at Snailbeach mine and we have been wanting to go to the deep mine tour for some years. They only have the tours a couple of times a year and it’s always been flyable on the open days. Today was way too windy, so we duly arrived at the mine at 10am and got entry tickets one and two. The tour was excellent with our guide an extremely enthusiastic volunteer, who seemed to know something about every mine in the UK, as well as the local history.

Snailbeach used to be the most productive lead mine in Europe and it is 1700′ deep, although most of it is now flooded. They started extracting barytes in the latter part of the mine use and you can still see the white mineral in abundance in the shafts. Next we toured the buildings above ground and then went home to do yet more work.

A group of hangies are around this weekend on an XC meet and they’ve extended the pub invitation to us this evening, so we’re off to talk hang-dangling with the lads.

See photos of today.

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Geoff writes: sunny, but howling. A day of gardening (well, pulling up weeds – I don’t really plant things); visiting museums (House on Crutches in Bishops Castle) and archery (for a short time – it was really cold in the evening).

A good forecast for tomorrow, most of the pilots in the UK are currently planning to be at Llangollen. Should be interesting.

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