| Flight details: | A really enjoyable, challenging flight through a thick inverted pea soup air mass. Challenge number one was getting off the ground. Always a bit of an ordeal at Sharpenhoe. Having arrived at 11am, by nearly 4pm, I'd clocked up 2 minutes airtime. So in a last ditch attempt, I launched into a bit of lifty air coming up the hill only to find the whole ridge working and after a beat and a half I found a nice core to take me up and away. Another pilot on an Enzo watched me and launched when he saw me doing well, but he must have been too late as the last I saw of him, he was soaring the trees.
This was very different to all my recent flights. The strong feisty spring thermals were gone to be replaced by lazy, but small, difficult to core thermals which would disappear and reappear somewhere nearby. Cloudbase (and the airspace ceiling) was around 3500, but I never got above 3000ft no matter how hard I tried. There was another inversion at 2000ft which with tenacity you could punch through. I kept on falling back through it though when I needed to crosswind to avoid the lower airspace to the south.
It was quite exciting crossing the M1 and the Midland Mainline raliway. I thought there was a jet aircraft that I couldn't see bearing down on me at one point, but it turned out it was a train so the chances of a collision were low.
I got quite excited when, after a crosswind glide, I found a textbook thermal with a cloud sitting over a large body of water, obviously being triggered by the upwind edge.
Eventually after clearing all the airspace, my luck/patience ran out. I was circling over a village for a while, but it was weak and scrappy and I was slowly losing height so I decided to try my luck further downwind, but I just found more scrappy broken lift. It was 5:30 by this point, but the sky suggested it was still working somewhere. The birds were considerate enough not to tease me though as they flapped their wings whenever they flew over my landing |
