| Flight details: | I decided to take up Catherine's BCC request for flyers and headed off to South Wales for the weekend.
Saturday was blown out and we left the hill early to enjoy the rest of the day.
Sunday promised to be flyable early afternoon and that promise brought out a lot of pilots - not just the BCC-.
A couple of hangies braved the still strong and gusting winds but it took a lonely red ribbon launching from lower down the hill and floating around in front of take off to encourage us of the hill. And away we went. Andrew Craig took off just before me and then I lost him for a while.
I worked my way along the Pandy ridge heading north looking for lift. After a few ups and downs OI finally found some decent thermals as the ridge turned directly into wind and I managed to get up to cloud base.
I worked my way back to take off area and found Andrew thermalling around there. 4 of us got away and headed off for Sugar top (sugar hill?)
We found several areas of list and kept heading in a WsW direction. All seemed to eb going well and then the clouds started to fizzle out, I hit blue sky and had to land.
Andrew had a bit more height and managed to cross to the other side of the valley. I was left with a walk out across the obligatory, fences, walls, barbed wire and train track. I eventualy got to a main road after a bit of a hike. Walked about a mile down the road to a junction when a local pilot drove by and gave me a lift back to Pandy. Very lucky.
End result 28.5 K for the BCC and 33K with 2 turnpoints my best ever XC flight doubling my previous UK XC of 15km. |
