| Flight details: | Slackers on tour day out to Combe with Catherine, Garry and Boris. RASP looked epic, 4 stars minimum all afternoon, but very light winds and a bit easterly, which isn't meant to be the best for Combe.
Got to the hill around 11 to be greeted with 0 wind and 100% cloud cover, not what was promised! Spent the next four hours practising walking up the hill with my glider, and having a cheeky downwind slope landing into a massive patch of stinging nettles. Good times. At least it was quiet.
Around 3pm the sky started to clear and the day switched on a bit. Launched into a nice climb but got mobbed by all the frustrated pilots on the hill and pushed out of the good lift. Still managed to go over the back at around 1,500ft, but I wasn't totally convinced so headed back to the hill and top landed. A few minutes later a couple of gliders marked a good climb over the right hand spur. This time no-one wanted to join me. Probably the strongest climb I've ever had, pretty much spiral diving straight upwards, I kept trying to open the turn a little to calm it down, but couldn't centre otherwise so had to keep turning super tight.
Climbed to around 3k, where the climb slowed down. Boris had gone over the back not much higher than ridge height, right below me, and was scrabbling, but eventually got a climb up to base with me, awesome!
Wind was quite easterly and was blowing us into airspace, so I tried to head South to get some clearance. Got under a nice cloud street, which took me about 5km with barely a turn. Pretty much the first time I've ever glided to a cloud and have it work, which was great, following the street was easy, and the small clouds meant I didn't have to worry about being sucked in. By this time the sky was almost blue, amazing to go from completely overcast to blue in about 30 minutes. There was nothing downwind of me so headed to a tiny wispy cloud to my right, just upwind of Andover. Unfortunately this was getting me much closer to the airspace |
