Tuesday, 11th August 2009
Posted by Geoff on 11 Aug 2009 at 07:17 pm | Tagged as: Flying
Geoff writes: just shows you shouldn’t get too excited about a day. I thought it was going to be a really good day, as obviously did the Derbyshire Soaring Club and the Pennines Club, who both came down in force. In the event, it started off ok, with nice cumulus development on most sides of the Long Mynd, though not above it. We all flew a bit, then most of us landed, presumably, like me, waiting for it to get a bit better, and the clouds start popping off above. They did a bit, but then the wind began a steady rise, and the sky began to blue out. Most people relaunched, though not me (the increasing wind bothered me), a few went over the back in dribs and drabs, but didn’t seem very high, and were flying into the blue, rather than to clouds. In spite of that they did some good flights – Grouse did 31km, Nigel Prior did 72. Be interesting to see how far others got.
Eventually, and predictably given the type of day it turned out to be, the big lenticulars started appearing.
Hang gliders flew most of the day; I hadn’t taken mine confidently expecting to be doing a long XC on the paraglider. In the end, we gave up and went home, and I was too annoyed with the day to be bothered going out again with the HG.
And Judith is now recording another podcast, this time with Tom Payne, on his experiences in the X-Alps, following up the podcast about his preparation for the event. There are now around four podcasts recorded, but not yet edited, and these will be released over the next few weeks, depending on how bad the weather is.
3 Responses to “Tuesday, 11th August 2009”
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Arrived late and wasn’t expecting anything more than a nice social fly in a cloudless sky but managed to get high…ish eventualy at the south end and decided to go for a joly to probably Church-stretton but was joined by Barney , simon baillie tootling around in scrappy lift.
Barney dropped behind wenlock edge in a death glide, simon stayed a bit behind and joined me but decided to go back to helen wich was following on the next bus/climb.
I aimed towards Bridgnorth and found another poor climb over a farm then a snarly little nothing just before the town but never transformed to anything, despite waiting for it to pop and started to be quite low drifting over houses just high enough to “soar” the ridge east of town (power lines, horses fields and not much safe landings) so decided to shoot back over a field with combine- harverster working in it, only problem was, he only had cut twice around the field so the runway was a “tadd” narrow.
I made my approach on the next crop downwind crossed the road where a white van was flashing at me after stopping to let me land on it!! but I managed to cross both hawthorn hedges,the uncut perimeter of crop, had to lift my legs up not to make any damage and run like hell to stop the glider dropping on it!
40.1km NOTALOT but GREAT fun …Size is not everything 😉
Just shows it’s always worth going, even under a sky which doesn’t look that good, and is mostly blue.
I followed somebody nearly to base at about 3:00pm but bottled out before getting there, the cloud was looking fairy choppy, the climb to 2400ato was fast and a bit iffy, I saw nothing behind so went out front to a small development that worked a bit, then nowt! so I glided back to T/O.
Good flying though, rewarded with a great evening flight later.