Judith above Puig d'Afrou.Crap weather… pah! It was beautiful, sunny and hot. However, the one drawback was that it was east. Great for Roca Corba, but Geoff wasn’t keen to fly the hangie, so we decided to revert to the standard weekend plan, Puig d’Afrou in the morning and Santa Brigida in the afternoon. I was still feeling a little under the weather, so I was going to drive for him, if necessary, and then fly at Santa Brigida later.

We drove past Santa Brigida and it was north (it was still early!) but at La Cellera it was south. When we got to the bar where everyone meets there was no one there. The only reason could be that the forecast had people making other plans. The flag above looked like there was no wind at all. We headed up and on top it was east, as forecast. It wasn’t that there wasn’t any wind, it was just that the flag was so decimated by the sun that it looks from the bottom like there is no wind. We won’t fall for that one again!

The thermals were bringing it on for seconds on both the N and S launch, but never enough to actually be able to get off. It was very iffy for a long time, but once the cycles got stronger I got ready, only to find that the east wind set in. We got a phone call from Roger to say it was flyable at Santa Brigida, but the sky above us was just getting better and better. I couldn’t bear the thought of driving down and missing the next hour of the day. Half a sweaty hour later it finally wafted up the south side and I was off. I dashed straight round to the east face and found weak thermals in the gullies. I bimbled about and didn’t make enough of the conditions, mainly because the drift (in weak thermals) was taking me straight towards the dam at Susqueda. There are no landing places there – not even the road. Half an hour later I landed at the bottom and we went to Santa Brigida, where we hooked up with Roger who was flying in his airline pilot shirt, minus gold epaulettes, having just landed from a return flight from Poznan. Very cool. We all had a couple of flights and the conditions got better and better. On my last flight I struggled to get down. A few others turned up for a post lunch flight at 4.30pm. Then the wind turned east and got light so we canned it and had a cold beer while we packed up.

See photos of today.

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