As I sit here in my office contemplating what to write, I can see out of the window for miles. What I notice firstly is that it is not raining...at least not over head anyway. Secondly looking at the Cu and distant CB they now seem crisp and heavy, driven by decent energy and not like the limp lifeless Cu we get used to over the winter.
This past Saturday marked the first official day of spring, the forecast looked reasonable and so I decided to arrive at the club nice and early, one to bag a single seater, and two to get the kit out nice and early.
We briefed at 09:30 in the crew room and were all out on the field by 10am. I did a stint on the winch and with clear blue skies and zero wind it was extremely pleasant sitting inside the new Skylaunches cab. within a short space of time the launch point had several K13's K21's, K8's and Astirs sitting there ready to go and they were soon joined by a Ventus (DW) some K6's.
I took a launch at just before 12 and scratched around for 20mins below 1500 until I found a good 3kt climb to just under cloud base at 2k. Over the next 30mins the base went up to nearly 3k and I was soon joined by a whole heap of gliders, infact looking back at the launch point I could see only one aircraft on the ground.
Dave Watt set off on a 230k in DW which he had to cut short at Towcester close to the last leg. I was going to attempt a short sub 100k flight but only got out half way down the first leg when I was called back having been airborne for 1:30 already.
It was great to see the fleet airborne together and everybody seemed to be mindful of us all being a bit rusty, plenty of room was afforded in thermals and with the exception of DW seemed to be sticking pretty local, just to get back into the swing of things.
Lee
In just a few short weeks the clocks will be going forward and we will have had some of our first serious thermic XC flights done....Bring it on.
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