PGs at LlangollenJudith: We had an active day, starting off with archery. It was pretty cloudy in Church Stretton, and we weren’t sure about the flying, but we took the PGs anyway. We then got a call from Graeme saying it was flyable at Llangollen, so off we went, arriving just after 2pm. Strong wind, but just compression, fine in the air. I launched from lower down the hill, and within a few minutes was 1800′ over. There wasn’t much drift in the thermal, so I was only marginally behind the masts. Cloudbase was about 2100′ ATO at the time, but I lost the thermal and then had to decide whether to head back to the ridge or go over the back.

It wasn’t much of a decision… I went on a glide. It’s always an adventure and you never know what’s going to happen next. What happened next was not a lot! I flew over a few guys learning to paraglide (they all stopped what they were doing to watch me fly over), I heard a beep over a farm and turned back but couldn’t find the thermal, so flew on. I saw a buzzard and got very exited only to find him fly off. I landed in a field next to a farmer spraying he gave me a cheery wave and Geoff called to say he was on his way. At this point I had no idea where I was, so when I got out of the field to walk to the village I flagged down the first car and he took me to Weston Rhyn, which was a bit out of the way for him so extremely kind of him to do so. Geoff came 3 minutes after I arrived and whipped me back up the hill. We flew again, and I got high again, but the sky downwind looked so poor it didn’t seem worth going over the back again.

Geoff was in the air as well and we could see wave bars forming upwind. It got quite bouncy at times, so we landed, packed up and raced to the supermarket to cater for the dinner we had with Martin and Ali later.

See photos of today.

See video of Clive launching the tandem.

See Andrew Donnison’s Youtube video of today.

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