Judith's blog

We went to Bache. The forecast was for strengthening winds and this turned out to be true. I began to wonder about the conditions on the drive there, but Mark L. was flying his acro wing when we arrived. He landed and reported very rough conditions. The HG league were also at Bache, as was the BBC film crew with helicopter. The HG task was to Bala lake, some 80km away.

Geoff rigged his HG and despite Paul, Mark and Graeme flying their PGs, I decided the wind was too strong to make it fun. Graeme and Paul landed at the bottom, but Mark braved a top landing, which made interesting viewing. Jocky, with Andrew Marr from the BBC on tandem, seemed to be getting blown back, but managed to push forward slowly and I assume they landed somewhere to the east of Bache.

Geoff managed to leave the hill pretty fast, found a second thermal, but decided to go on a cross-wind glide to a cloud, lost too much height and was downed about 15km from the hill.

It’s a shame Geoff didn’t get to Bala. I would probably have got to him quicker than I did. As it was, he was in the middle of nowhere and I had no mobile signal and the GPS kept losing the satellites. The exhaust fell off and I spent ages under the car trying to re-attach it with a glider tie (a cattle grid did for it in the end). Who said retrieves were part of the XC adventure?

See photos of today.

See video of Mark’s top landing.

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