The forecast (yesterday) for today was an excellent day. Wall-to-wall sunshine and we were all getting quite excited about the flying prospects. Then we woke up and the sky was grey and it was raining! They did a hedge all bets update with sun-rain-snow-fog-NW-S possible anywhere in the NE. The synoptic only showed high pressure, so that gave us no further clues. Arrgghh. There was a collective shoulder shrug from our little mid-week group and then we waited to see what would happen. We briefly even considered going to Àger, but too much to do here (people to see, places to go). When it started clearing we settled on Bellmunt and Nicky came along to say good-bye. What we hadn’t spotted, until we drove up the road, were the massive wave bars all over the place. Hmmmm.

When we got to Torelló, Oriol gave us a big thumbs up for the conditions, while Geoff, Nicky and I did a collective eyebrow raise. Tomas also seemed unconcerned about the wave, saying it was way high and wouldn’t affect us. To be fair, he is a professional balloon pilot and spends a lot of time high, so must know a thing or two about these conditions.

Once up at the top, we could see the wave dissipating, but we still waited until after 3pm until we all took off. Conditions were very bouyant and you could easily get high, but cloudbase wasn’t high enough to easily get to Olot and the clouds there looked more ominous anyway. Nicky was the low save queen of the day, getting up from very low down twice and thermalling past the rest of us!

Nice day out, although sad to have to say farewell. It was good practice for later… We went for goodbye dinner at my parents and had to say cheerio to them and Debi too.

See photos of today.

No comments yet - please add one »