December 2010
Monthly Archive
Thursday, 30th December 2010
Judith 30 Dec 2010 | : Boring stuff
Another day in the sick bed, but I did manage to get up and make dinner, so there’s hope for tomorrow night yet. Unfortunately, my dad’s under the weather and Geoff is starting to cough and sneeze too. Still, at least the weather’s crap, so we’re not missing much.
Wednesday, 29th December 2010
Judith 30 Dec 2010 | : Boring stuff
I woke up feeling terrible, and didn’t improve much during the day. No idea what the actual weather outside was, as I didn’t really get out of bed much. I think the sun came out in the afternoon. No phone calls to go flying, so either nobody bothered, or they realised from my croaky voice and constant sneezing that we may not be out for a few days. I hate being ill. Where’s my lemsips?
Tuesday, 28th December 2010
Having been pleased that I was the only adult not to have suffered from the cold over Christmas, I finally succumbed to it today. I was too bunged up and dizzy to think about flying, although it looked like a good day. Oriol was heading off to Sant Pere de Rodes and Johnny and Marc were off to Santa Brigida. Not sure what it was like at the latter, but Oriol reported that they had two hours of soaring at Sant Pere de Rodes, playing, doing wingovers and managing to fly along the whole length of the ridge several times. Unfortunately, Geoff had sacrificed himself to care for me in my sick bed, so missed all the fun.
And it appears that the Meteocat forecasters are full of the Christmas spirit… they made a little sunny man out of weather symbols on the forecast today. How cute!
Monday, 27th December 2010
Judith 28 Dec 2010 | : Trying, but failing, to fly
My sister and family were leaving at 7am, so we were up from about 6am, saying goodbye. I went back to bed, but didn’t get much sleep. We left my parents at about 10am and headed home to get our gliders and go out to Santa Brigida. A south forecast, so nothing guaranteed. There seemed little wind on the way, and the direction was variable, so it was anyone’s guess what the wind would be doing on site.
When we arrived, it seemed very west on the ground, but the flag on top showed south. We waited a little while in the landing field, while a few gusts came through, and had a snooze to make up for lost sleep in the morning.
After waking up it still seemed south, so we drove up. There were wave bars ahead and behind and the westerly component was evident, but it was only after walking behind the take-off to take a picture of the sky that I realised what was actually happening. The gust were coming up the side of the hill, very strongly. This meant that the warmed rock and trees were bringing it on to the point where you thought that it was actually ok to fly, but in reality, the wind was actually more like 110 degrees off. It wasn’t safe to fly, so we read our books some more and then went to Fonter to get fizzy water from the spring. It was probably flyable elsewhere, if we had bothered to drive to somewhere else.
Friday, 24th to Sunday, 26th December 2010
Judith 28 Dec 2010 | : Holiday
Christmas was a nice family affair, with my sister, brother-in-law and nearly three year old niece and I spending it up at my parent’s house in Rupit.. Lovely sunny weather and we managed to go out for a walk everyday, although not too long ones, since everyone took it in turns to feel under the weather with a cold, and my sister is heavily pregnant.
Christmas day was great. We usually open our presents in turn, so it takes a long time, but everyone gets to see what everyone else got and you get to play with stuff before moving on to the next. So half-way through the presents we stopped to play the Elefun game, where we all had to run around catching butterflies which were being blown out of a plastic elephant’s trunk.
I got one of the best presents ever! My parents know that I love relief maps, so they checked on the Catalan Cartological Service web site and found that there are such maps available for La Garrotxa, the area we live in. I now have a 1:100 000 3D map of the area, with nearly all the flying sites on. I spent a happy afternoon looking at all the ridges, hills and bumps, planning flights and re-living previous XCs.
After rabbit for lunch we played daft games most of the day. Boxing Day had us walking along the cliff to Tavertet for a sumptous lunch at Faves Comptades (counted beans), before Geoff came back from the UK, to spend the evening with us.
And Johnny flew every day over Christmas. Two good days, one ok. It did look pretty good from where I was.
Thursday, 23rd December 2010
Another unflyable day, with a lot of snow forecast in the mountains and rain in the valley. Predictably, it was a sunny morning with plenty of blue sky. We were regretting not going skiing until the sky clouded over and it started pouring.
It was a good job we didn’t go. Picking up last minute presents and ingredients for Christmas cooking would have been even more of a rush if we had got stuck in the ski resort. As it was, we got to Rupit for a nice meal with the family in good time. Holidays now for a few days…
Wednesday, 22nd December 2010
Another rainy day, although we did get a phone call from Johnny, who thought there might be a flyable window at Santa Brigida during the middle of the day. Even if it had been, we didn’t want to get our gliders wet and muddy, so declined.
Geoff got on with some proper work, but I was feeling a bit unmotivated, so messed about doing jobs and then settled down to some proper displacement activity: looking at some stats for the blog. It made interesting viewing, although I have yet to do a proper in-depth analysis (not that I ever will… Geoff has shamed me into not wasting good working days from now on.)
Anyway, from a quick glance, we’ve had more than 30,000 podcast and web cast downloads from the site and interestingly, the largest number of downloads for the winter flying podcast are in the months of June/July/August; and the largest for flying in alpine conditions in December/January/February. Go figure.