Judith's blog

Geoff writes: warm (19C), sunny, thermic. There’s a big area of high pressure here, pushing all the bad weather north. We did some work in the morning, then went to Santa Brigida (mostly because we were short of time) and flew with Marc and Oriol. A nice, technical, Santa Brigida day, with lots of lift, and some big sink cycles. We got very low down during one of them. Three of us scratching and thermalling very close together, very close to the trees and to the rocks …. for one person it would have been tricky, for three it was much harder. Judith and I managed to scrape back up, Oriol had to bottom land, as did Marc later on when he went too far out in front and didn’t make it back high enough to scratch back up.

So we ended up on top, with the usual beer and sandwich, before taking Marc’s car down.

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Geoff writes: since it’s only the reading week for the conference, we can take the odd day off, so decided to go skiing. It started off really nice and sunny, but soon clouded over, with massive wave bars. The skiing was still good, but we much prefer to ski when it’s sunny, rather than in the shade – we find it much harder to read the snow. Though my spectacular fall today was whilst it was still sunny. We were skiing the black double diamond run, one we’ve done before. It is narrow, and you have to do a steep turn within about four metres of setting off, and today it was hard ice exactly where you make the turn. I managed the turn, but fell over immediately afterwards, losing both poles and one ski, and managed to slide most of the rest of the way down the slope, before stopping – I probably got down faster without my skis, than I usually do with them. Judith thought this was very funny.

Until a little later we went right to the top of the resort, where it was howling. You have to cross the path of a button lift, and dodging behind one of them, she hit two small snow drifts, one after the other, which made her splat on her face. Payback for laughing at me.

We left fairly early, partly because of the work, but also because it’s not as much fun when it’s cold and cloudy.

See photos of today.

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Geoff writes: today our Supporting Deaf People conference opened for reading. This is the week when delegates can download and read/view the numerous presentations, in preparation for the discussions themselves starting next week. So, whilst we had a lot to do this morning, sending out registration info, etc., we were planning to take a couple of hours off this afternoon to go flying. But it wasn’t to be – nice warm day, blue skies, but very windy, north everwhere, rather than just a tramuntana, and the wind machines were giving variations on north, so it seemed unlikely Santa Brigida – or anywhere else – would be working. So we went for the old standby of a beer and a sandwich in Besalu.

And tonight, Judith is recording another podcast, which will be released in the next few weeks.

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Finally the bad weather is over. Wall-to-wall sunshine is now forecast for the foreseeable future. The four days of snow in the mountains have produced excellent conditions. We went to ski with Debi, and Masella and the Cerdanya valley actually look like they should… mostly snow covered!

We had a lovely day out… the skiing was great, lovely views, nice chat and great to get out before the conference opens for reading tomorrow. We’re restricted for time from then, so things need to be fitted around the work. Shame really that the bad weather wasn’t next week.

See photos of today.

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The plan was to work in the morning and then head out to Santa Brigida at lunch time to get a quick flight. However, the synoptic showed an occluded front coming in and Meteocat was giving deteriorating conditions. By mid-day, the sky had clouded over and the wind direction was also wrong, so we didn’t bother going out. It was a good call, the rainfall radar showed precipitation at Santa Brigida in the afternoon and it snowed on El Mont. We’re nearly there with the conference, just waiting for one last straggler of a presentation…

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Turns out that the flying conditions at Santa Brigida yesterday were really good. Big, smooth thermals and lots of sky to play with. It didn’t rain until the early evening. A phone call to Marc confirmed that people were already flying at Santa Brigida this morning. I had to take my parents to the airport at mid-day, so instead of Geoff going off on his own and my meeting him there, we went all together in one car.

The sky towards the mountains wasn’t stunning and when we got to Amer, we could see all the pilots sitting in the bar, rather than on the hill. We drove to the landing anyway, but it started spitting soon after. Since the forecast was for deteriorating conditions, we headed home, into some serious rain.

We spent a lovely evening at Debi’s, who cooked us her signature dish of rabbit and meatballs. Delicious.

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We woke up this morning expecting to hear the noise of rain. A quick look out of the window showed big blue bits in the sky. The weather just got nicer and nicer and we even considered going flying at Bellmunt, but decided to have a look at the updated forecast. The sat pic showed a big blue hole over us that would move by afternoon and the synoptic didn’t seem to match the sat pic. Come 11.30am we were eagerly awaiting the Meteocat update, when they rolled back the web site and treated us to Wednesday’s forecast. It stayed like that for an hour, until we just decided to not chance flying (it was probably snowed up or muddy anyway) and go to Girona instead.

The sky was certainly mixed when we left the house. Beautiful blue sky to the north and south, wave to the east and black clouds to the west. At the Girona turn-off we had a brain wave to go to Figueres instead. Since they built the by-pass we haven’t been to the town centre, so it’s been years since we were last there. Most of the towns here have really been spruced up in the last few years, so we decided to have a look to see if this was the case in Figueres too.

The town is mostly famous as the birth place of Dalí and contains the huge Dalí Theatre-Museum. The whole town is very arty – lots of public scultpures and paintings, as well as sculptures on the roundabouts. It has improved a lot. We had a pleasant look around and when the sky clouded over and we got cold, we went for a slap up lunch. We arrived back at the car just as the rain started.

See photos of today.

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