| Flight details: | Rough at the dyke in the morning. It was windy and broken thermals so i top landed and had coffee with Johnny and Fran whilst conditions improved. We had all declared Dyke to North Foreland golf club.
Suddenly the wind dropped a bit and people started getting high so i jumped in my glider, took off straight into a solid 5 up and climbed to base with James, Chris, Paul, Steve and Dave Matthews. Unfortunately this was the strongest climb of the day. We started gliding towards lewes but the sky completely blued out and things became more tricky - weak climbs and a strong NW wind was pushing us towards Eastbourne.
Most landed by the time we got to Arlington Reservoir but Paul Harvey on his Rigid and Dave and me on our Moyes RX flewings carried on scrabbling cross wind. After Battle we all got a bit low and Paul and Dave headed upwind to try and find a climb and i stuck in some zeros drifting towards the coast hoping it would Kick off. Paul got too low here and had to land, Dave found a 2up and slowly started to climbed back up but luckily my climb finally kicked off a few hundred feet of the deck into a nice 4up with a cloud forming above me. I got to 5000ft and crosswind glided to a new cloud. The sky was starting to fill up with puffy cumulus again and climbs got a lot better. Dave had got up too and we arrived at the next cloud at the same height and same time. We did the next 50ish k together very quick under a great sky but 20k from north foreland the sky blued out again and the air felt very dead -possibly sea air but no convergence. Not much sink and only zeros to thermal in. About 700ft of the deck we clung onto a zero for a few minutes which drifted us towards deal where we decided we should land in some safe fields instead of carrying on to some unlandable ones. Sue picked us both up before we had even finished derigging and off to the local pub in the village we landed in for Dinner and Beer. Brilliant day. |
