The first day of sunshine for ages! We woke up to leaden skies, but there were patches of blue already showing. With strong tramunatana at the coast, Santa Brigida was going to be the best place to fly. I had to collect my parents from the airport, so Geoff and I arranged to meet there. The trade-off for fetching them, was that they then had to drive me to go flying.

The heavy rain made some of the bank next to the road unstable and a big rock has fallen and is now blocking the road. You can just about get past it by coming off the road, but without a 4×4, we thought we might get stuck, so parked up and started to walk. Luckily, Roger called us after about 10 minutes and came down for us. It had looked windy, but arriving on top, it had dropped right off and gone off to the east. Roger and Geoff launched, but it was scratchy and a bit rough, so both top landed after a short time. Tomas arrived, all keen to get his new kit in the air again, but I was starting to have some concerns about how far off to the east it was getting. Unless it’s 90 degrees off, it’s flyable, but the ridge doesn’t work when it’s off, and unless you get a thermal, you’re nearly guaranteed to go down. Tomas had the added problem of not being able to get into his new pod harness easily and by the time he’d done so, was a long way out from the hill and heading down. So we waited. It became very gusty for a while and clouded over, but at 4.30pm the conditions came good, the sun started shining, and we all had nice flights, getting to 900′ ATO. Geoff, Tomas and I got low at one point and had to work collaboratively to scratch the bowl behind the monastery to get back up and satisfyingly, we all did.

See photos of today.

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