| Flight details: | After several abortive attempts to gain height, including a flock of seagulls who thought it would be fun to simulate a thermal and lure me out, only to immediately glide off to the north going generally down, I was about to give up and go home as it was bound to sea breeze in a couple of minutes, I thought that it looked a bit more hopeful and launched straight into a fairly solid climb that took me to 2400 feet. Pushing forward into the now quite westerly wind gained a little height, but the groundspeed was minimal, so eventually I decided to turn and run downwind towards Ditchling under a line of convergence cloud. This upped the groundspeed considerably to about 55 km/hr and I had a steady climb to 2800 feet on the way to Plumpton, where there was a large cloud to the north, but a bit of a blue hole on track to Lewes. Giving up the idea of trying to do 64 km to celebrate my birthday of a similar number, I tried to glide to Lewes to save my wife a retrieve trip, but failed spectacularly and landed just east of Streat in a rapidly freshening sea breeze. Achieved 20% of the target distance and enjoyed the scenery on the way, |
