| Flight details: | After three flights, I felt knackered due to the amount of effort required for height gains of only 450'. There were lively thermals everywhere in the lift cycles but they never gave a climb of any great degree and fizzled out over the back. In the sink cycles people were going down. It was obvious, from the number of people up high, that you could be rewarded for perseverance. I gave it another go when a cycle seemed to be kicking off, taking off from the paddock and heading for the modeller's bowl. A weak thermal at the spur seemed not worth bothering with so I headed west to the other bowl, where there were some birds on the spur. When I got there, a bit low, there were a few swifts flitting around but no strong lift and I headed out over the houses in front. Still nothing but a bit of roughness and I turned towards the bottom landing. As I was over the NW corner of the field, with just enough height for a 360 into the field, I hit a bit of thermal and instantly turned left and managed to maintain for four 360s. This drifted me to the middle of the bottom landing field at 100' a.g.l. Matt and Ian were watching from the ground and shouting encouragement! The next 360 was in lift all the way round and I climbed to be 350' a.t.o. by the time I'd drifted over the front of the hill. My lowest ever save from the bottom of the Dyke! Staying with this thermal, I was joined by 2 P/Gs as we climbed to 2000' a.t.o. before they dropped away and I carried on to 2700' a.t.o. for an total average climb of 2-up. Looking back to the Dyke everyone seemed to be low down so I decided to carry on, heading east to a forming cloud the other side of Brighton. Before I got to it, I hit some lift over the middle of Brighton which felt like the sea-breeze front but had no lift stronger than 1-up, as I went east-west along it. There was no convergence visible, apart from a bit over the Lewes valley and there were good looking clouds right out to sea. I decided that this lift couldn't be sea |
