Felix flying at Santa Brigida.

What a lovely day out. We went flying with Nani and Joan at Santa Brigida. We were all getting excited on the drive up the hill because there were small cumulus about and the sun was shining.

I need to do some serious work with my new glider ready for the season, so I tried some ballast, having weighed in this morning at smack, bang in the middle of the weight range. My strong wind launches have been crap on the Aspen (I was warned about its speedy pull-up characteristics, but have not yet mastered it), and I can learn a lot more about thermalling it, so off to work I went…

Our first flight was very, very thermic. Strong climbs and kind of rough. We all flew way out into the valley and then all top landed. High cloud came in and we all flew again. The high stuff took the edge of the wind and the sharp edges off the thermals and made them nice, big and a joy to be in. Geoff and I both got high and considered going over the back, but decided to stick around the area.

Because I wanted to practise my launches, I wanted to do lots of touch and goes, but I couldn’t get down. There was lift everywhere and the glider really wants to fly. Getting down in the end meant some pretty radical turns near ground level. I finally managed to get better at ground-handling by launching the glider on the centre A lines only, which works quite well. Will try As and Cs next time.

By 4.30pm the wind got very light and then went off to the east, but we spotted two birds thermalling so I lobbed off and thermalled back up to 500 ATO and flew around, practising more top landings. I thought it was curtains for the day, but at 5pm it came back on and Felix and I flew for another 20 minutes.

So, to recap: rough thermals, sooth thermals, ridge lift then valley lift and it was flyable for about 5 hours in total. The day had it all!

See photos of today.

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