Thursday, 18th September 2008
Posted by Judith on 19 Sep 2008 at 09:07 am | Tagged as: Trying, but failing, to fly
I’ve just read through our XC tips again, in the hope that I might actually one day practice what we preach.
We went to the Malverns, after some debate as to where would be best today. The choices for us were Corndon (too low in light conditions), Snowdonia (far away and may be windy) or Malverns (direction might change). When we got to Kettle Sings the wind was bang on and the sky was fantastic.
Once on the launch the wind seemed to be dropping and one person was doing bunny hops, but didn’t seem to be able to get any height. The cumulus was still raggedy and there seemed to be no rush. The forecast said it would cloud over in the late afternoon from the west, but we could see no sign of it. By 1pm the clouds were getting a bit more organised and Brian Hindle launched and climbed very slowly to cloudbase. By this time the wind was nearly zero on launch. A gaggle of birds came over and a few people got up, but I blew a nil wind launch, so didn’t manage to join them. Five minutes later the high cloud came in from the east and shut everything down. The window to actually fly and get up was 25 minutes in total. By 3pm, it was clear that the mist and high cloud was there to stay, so we drove home. 10 miles from the Malverns it was beautiful blue sky, which stayed like that all the way home.
The day was completely different to what I expected from the forecast, so we were caught out by the conditions. None of this is an excuse for not being in the air when others were getting up. No point sitting on the ground when you’ve come out to fly!
Geoff’s comments: Rich went to Snowdonia which was, apparently, blown out. Kai went to Corndon, he was the only one there. Very light, but apparently very buoyant, but blue above. He launched, got up a little, went on a death glide, and landed in Church Stoke. I think we went to the right place; just hesitated too long before launching, thinking it was going to get better when, in fact, it went a lot worse.
3 Responses to “Thursday, 18th September 2008”
Leave a reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
You were at the wrong place. James got 2000ft at Bache, and if you had been at Talybont 90 mins before we got there, you would have had a fantastic flight(to Pen-y Fan) and back. It’s all in the timing, I’m sure you’ll agree.
No, we were at the right place (there was more than one right place that day, including Corndon). People did get high; we just misjudged the day, expecting it to get better, and waited too long to launch.
Similarly at Llantisilio there was about a 20 min ‘window’ when good height gains were possible and the one XC pilot in the air at the time got up and away at 4000′ (ASL?). After that it was soarable but difficult to get above ridge height.