On paper today was a good day, with the BBC and others giving a nice sunny day. The only source of doom was RASP, who were giving weak thermal strength and overdevelopment from early on. Geoff had a phone meeting at 9.30am and then some follow up work to do, so we didn’t get out as early as we hoped. Kai was leaving to go XC as we arrived at the Long Mynd and the wind was picking up, so rather than chatting we got into the air fast.

I got a good climb from the south end, but didn’t take it back low enough, lost it and had to come to the front, losing most of my hard earned altitude. Geoff, Mick and Martin came to join me at the south end, but didn’t get into the same climb and this time I did go low over the back. I figured that if the wind was going to pick up more it would just get harder and time was getting on.

I lost the climb over the A49 and had to fly south west to connect with another cloud. I thermalled with it over Wenlock Edge, but then lost it again and went on an ambitious glide to a big cloud near Brown Clee. On the way there I lost loads of height and was berating myself for chasing a cloud that was too far. However, I was convinced it would work if I could just get under it. I was getting to the point where I thought I would have to land when I got the climb and screamed up to base at 3700′. I pulled out of the climb and went on glide, but got sucked into the cloud and had to big ear to keep the ground visible below me.

The next cloud was over the other side of Brown Clee and I started spotting showers to the north and increasingly big clouds to the south. At this point I resolved to set myself a ceiling of a height I wouldn’t go above, since I couldn’t be sure how big the clouds were getting above me. As I progressed, the wedge of sunlight I was flying along was getting smaller and smaller and the showers were starting to develop in front as well as to the north. Once I got to near Kidderminster, there was no sun on the ground and my path was blocked by big clouds and I could count seven showers around me. Time to land!

I picked a nice big field on the edge of town, but then realised it had posh horses in it, so I diverted to a cropped field and did a spot landing on the path along the outside edge of it. A nice elderly dog walker came to ask where they’d dropped me from and then gave me directions to the train station (too far) and pub (I’d be able to get a taxi from there). 10 minutes later he came back and said he’s drive me instead. What a kind man. To make a long and boring retrieve story short (too late!), I bumped into Kai at Kidderminster bus station and Geoff came to pick us up. Kai had got to Bromsgrove and also been blocked by the cunims, except he got rained on before he managed to land.

Highlight of the day was circling with six buzzards under a big cloud. You don’t often see them high up, but the seven of us were happily climbing together, with one circling close to me to have a closer look. Just amazing.

Geoff writes: rubbish flight, brilliant hitching. Actually, the flight wasn’t that rubbish in the circumstances, but short, only 20km. It took me a while to get away from the Mynd, mostly because I don’t like being drifted back too low, partly because of the glider airfield we share the ridge with, so I wanted a strong climb, and kept pushing forward, and, eventually, I got my climb. This took me to base with another glider, and we wandered off down wind. I was happily on my third climb, past Wenlock Edge, when I saw a shower, and quite a large cu-nim, in the distance off to the north. A few more 360s, and there were four showers and two cu-nims. And it was pretty dark ahead. So my plan changed, and I stopped taking the climb up to base, and decided to head towards the edge of clouds, rather than the centre – just because I couldn’t be at all sure what was above the small part of the very large clouds I was under. This was the right decision for safety reasons, but the wrong one for distance, and soon I was down on the ground, near Brown Clee. I landed in a field with sheep in, not noticing the farmer who was also there until too late – but he was fine, very friendly.

The area around Brown Clee is the middle of nowhere. I got to a road, the sort of road which has one car every 24 hours – and about ten minutes after I got there, it duly arrived, and he stopped, and gave me a ride to Diddlebury. A really nice person, genuinely interested in what I’d done. He dropped me off at the school, where he was picking up his daughter, and I walked a short distance to the main road. After hitching there for all of five minutes, I got picked up by another extremely nice person, a lady on her way home to Craven Arms. Very quickly, she offered to take me back to our car on the Mynd – quite a detour for her. On the drive it turned out that she and Judith knew lots of people in common, both having worked at University of Wolverhampton.

I nearly always enjoy the hitching back after an XC, not least because the people who pick you up are usually very nice (otherwise they woudn’t have stopped) and often pretty interesting to talk to.

Getting back to the car so quickly, I went to retrieve Judith and Kai from Kidderminster.

See photos of today.

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