| Flight details: | I'd been looking at the forecast for a couple of days and it was steadily getting windier to the point that if I'd been at home on Saturday morning, I probably wouldn't have bothered, but as I'd driven 2/3 of the way to Wales the night before, I was committed to going to a hill at least.
On the drive over, the sky was already looking epic at 8:30am. I arrived at Corndon to find no one else there. It started off flyable, but was steadily getting windier as forecast.
At this point I'm not optimistic, but I move on to plan B which is to go to Long Mountain which is a gentler slope, so more suited to the strong wind. I arrived to the ominous sight of about 10 pilots packing up. There was one person flying though - whose nickname, due to past flying adventures and the fact he's a postman, is Postman Splat! - so I hung around for a bit using him as a wind dummy.
As time went on the lulls got longer and gentler, so eventually it was time to launch. It was a bit gnarly in places and I was gale hanging for a bit, just creeping forward at trim speed, but then it suddenly dropped and I went up and forwards into the core of a great climb straight to base at 5500ft.
My mantra, after my last flight, was to get high, stay high. This turned out to be quite easy, in the epic sky. The only difficulty being how cold it was up there. After a few climbs to base, I was relieved to glide down below 3000ft and get some feeling back in my fingers only to suddenly fly into a thermal that was taking me back up at 4m/s. For such a strong thermal, it surprisingly wasn't all that boisterous, but I decided that I didn't want to be that cold again, so I flew off downwind at 4000ft, getting a bit of SIV practice on the way out!
After flying through all the sink around that last thermal, I'm not that high and it's getting trickier. The clouds are spreading out and there's an inversion around 3000ft so I drift in some scrappy broken lift for a while, but I'm conscious that I'm dr |
