Today was a will-it-won’t-it day. At first it definitely seemed a write-off, but then the forecast changed and it was light winds and the sun came out. We had just made arrangements to meet Johnny at Santa Brigida when the wind started picking up a lot. He was at the drop zone in Empuria Brava where the jump master was restricting people will less than 400 jumps from going up in the plane and they were anticipating stronger winds to come. Johnny wasn’t keen and so we finally settled on having a rest day. However, it seemed too nice a day to sit indoors, so we resurrected an old plan to go and check out some flying sites up north. Lots of sites here have fallen into disrepair due to lack of use, so we wanted to confirm that Les Salines and Neulos are still usable before wasting a good flying day going up there for nothing. We’ve also never really ventured into the countryside in that area, so we thought it would make a nice day out.

Neulos straddles the border and you need to access it from the French side. As we approached La Jonquera we could see cloud base was about 700m. Since the launch is 1246m it seemed a waste to drive up and stand in fog. So we turned round and headed to Les Salines instead. We stopped off briefly at Darnius, a nice, but unspectacular village. There is a huge reservoir near Darnius, but we missed the turn off and drove along side it until I spotted a bit of it… there was so little water in the lake that we had been looking over it, rather than at it.

We found the road up to Les Salines and headed up. After a kilometer the road changed from tarmac to dirt and we wound our way up the mountain for 9km until we encountered a snow drift which we couldn’t cross. Argghhh. After a picnic in the woods, we drove down again, not having seen the launch. The mountain does look great though. A huge bowl with sharp rocks. It reminded me of some of the mountains you get in the Gredos.

Once we were off the mountain and back in Maçanet de Cabrenys, we drove around trying to find the old bit, but managed to completely bypass it, so thought it was newish and didn’t stop to look around. We did find the dam at Boadalla, but it isn’t a patch on the Susqueda dam.

By this time Geoff was getting a bit frustrated with the day. So far everything had just gone wrong! We decided to ditch the day and just meet up with Johnny in Figueres to give him the Hook. On the way there, Geoff slammed the brakes on and reversed back. He’d spotted a waterfall. He’s a real sucker for them and his thing is always to try to get behind the water. We walked up to it and managed to get into the cave behind. Then we discovered a proper cave and a way of climbing up to get behind the waterfall again into a different cave. It was brilliant and saved the day.

See photos of today.

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