Geoff writes: another epic (I don’t use the word lightly) day at Corndon, which we again managed to mess up. We thought the wind would start off strongish, but drop during the day. So we arrived with Kai, Mark L., Mick, Alan, Gordon and others, late morning. A couple of others were already there, Steve Parsons and Dave Birch. Steve and Dave left as we were launching, doing around 130km. Kai, Judith and I were flying; Kai was slightly higher, and left with the next thermal. We were both drifting back far too fast, and came back to the front, on the assumption it would drop off a little, and be easier for us to climb out without being blown back too low. That was a mistake – Kai got to Tenby, 137km.

The Joint Services comp turned up, some of them got away in the increasing wind, though I think most didn’t get very far. Mark L. got away, to Cardigan Bay (90km I think he said). I flew a couple of times, but it was really top end for me, and, again, as soon as I got in a thermal I was drifting rapidly over the back. In the end, after sitting around on launch for a while waiting for it to drop off, which it didn’t, I launched in a lull, got in a thermal, and this time did get blown back very low. Fortunately, I managed to climb out.

It was odd after that. Drifting back from launch was rough – the wind was strong, I was low. I had a few collapses, but these stopped as I got back above ridge height (I was really low over the back, not to be recommended in those winds. Silly really.). The further back I got, the less the drift was, which isn’t that unusual. I got to cloudbase, around 4300, in my second thermal with almost no drift at all. But then, flying to the next cloud (they were few and far between at this point in the day) as I got lower I realised I was getting slower and slower, and heading more into wind – the direction was slightly different lower down. And the lower I got, the stronger the drift was. In the end, I was relatively low, in the boonies – deep valleys and high ridges – and I was very reluctant to drift with the weak thermals I had in case they took me somewhere with no landing places. Eventually, I gave up, left the weak lift,  and landed on top of a ridge, coming down more or less vertically. Glad I did – shortly after I landed the wind picked up even more, and I would have been going backwards. The problems of flying a 1/2 glider. It was about 25km in total, not a lot at all, but very interesting flying!

So, today’s mistake: don’t second guess the weather, if you get a chance, go. If I’d gone with Kai, he’d have lost me after the first thermal, but I would almost certainly have got a lot further than I did, not least because the sky was better then.

We should probably change the XC tips page, to XC mistakes, since I seem to have made more this year than in all my other years of flying put together.

No comments yet - please add one »