Finally, some flying! The forecast seemed to me that you had to go north (to Scotland) or south, but the midlands were a claggy no-go. We chose the Malverns and it was a good call. As Wayne, Michaela, Geoff and I were driving down, the sky was getting better and better. People were already high and Frank reported good conditions, but it was starting to cycle and people were getting high whilst others were bottom landing.

We got ready and waited for a good time to launch. Geoff got off first, but launched into the tail end of the thermal and had to slope land, but I spotted three pilots thermalling up from the town and headed over to them. The thermal took me to base at 3600′. I went on glide to the next cloud, but hit some lift on the way. As I turned round to circle I found my turn blocked by Jocky and two army blokes. We did all fan out and searched for lift, but we got low, scrabbled around in a weak thermal and then spotted two guys behind us screaming up. I dashed back upwind to them. Geoff joined the same thermal and we all climbed up together back to base.

The rest of the flight was similar – glide, find weak lift, see someone else in a boomer, dash over, get high. At Hereford we had to make a decision to fly north of Credenhill airspace, or fly through the gap between Credenhill and the SAS base. We chose the gap. We got high and into a good position to fly downwind through the gap. There were little cumulus forming midway, and it was all looking rather marvellous, when we hit lots of sink and Geoff went down. I found a thermal over a farm, but it was very broken. A seagull nearby was circling in better lift, and I flew over, but couldn’t work it properly. I landed a couple of kilometers from Geoff in Kingstone (36km).

Superfast retrieve from Michaela, we went to pick up Wayne in Hay-on-Wye. He did his usual trick of flying over us from the Malverns. He did exactly the same a year ago – turns out the boy can fly after all!

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