I was told, or was it ordered, by TC to do a report for today’s flying!
Well perhaps if I just say it was possibly the best conditions that I’ve ever seen in Wales since I started gliding then perhaps that’ll give you an idea of how good it was.
Cloudbase went up and up and eventually settled around 6500ft amsl and the thermals were well defined meaty affairs all clearly marked with a cu until later in the day when it went a bit blue in places.
Task set earlier was for a 304km TAL-VRY(lake Vyrnwy just south of Bala)-BREcon town-NEwTown and return to TAL – a 300km flight all in Wales has always been one of my ambitions.
Mike T and me both completed the task by basically staying high and running fast between thermals and generally not missing any so as not to get too low, i.e. not below 3500ft amsl where the thermals were very broken and disorganised.
Getting to the turnpoint at Lake Vyrnwy was probably the most difficult part as the air was doing something odd, quite turbulent (I went completely negative G at one point), which was possibly the sea air pushing in from the west mixing with the air inland.
However, the views across Snowdonia were absolutely stunning in the crystal clear air. You could pick out rock features on the mountains and look right through to the coast.
So what did we all do – well Chris Short got to Vyrnwy and then went over to Shrewsbury, Mynd etc to break another personal distance – well done Chris your progress is truly amazing.
Poor Tony Bartlett got caught in one of the many severe sink areas and couldn’t escape it’s clutches but made a successful field landing near Llandindod.
Mike Codd, having a day off from his day job of gliding to go gliding, wandered off east but found conditions very unreliable so returned and decided not to wander to far afield.
Tony C – never one to follow the crowd(en) did his own thing off to Shrewsbury, Cray, Abergavenny and back ending his flight with a very spectacular finish.
Quite a few others were enjoying the unusually good conditions and as we all left the club with our boots full of flying. Paragliders could still be seen cruising around at 6500ft cloudbase.
If you weren’t there then all I can say is make sure you don’t miss the next good day, get up there and have some fun.
Martin P