| Flight details: | It was a disturbed night so I hadn't slept much and I had misread the met and thought that the best I could hope for was a bit of early morning flying before the wind went west and it all cut off. So having been woken early I thought I would nip up to the Dyke for a quick fly before breakfast.
So there I was having not slept much, uncharacteristically early, no breakfast, barely any water in my flask, batteries in my gps about to expire and my daughter called wanting to know when I will be back with the car. I guess all the omens were right. Oh yes and there were hundreds of pilots of desperate to fly with, at first. almost no air to play in.
Somehow on my third flight I managed to get into a nice climb with an Ozone Geo. Then I saw my thermaling partner fall out the back so I turned the other way to join another climb and slowly worked my up although it was frustrating to be slowly working away while better pilots like Franco and Dave zoomed around the sky around me. The next climb behind Brighton seemed to be uncomfortably close to scary-looking curtain clouds so I chickened-out of topping out and turned down wind for a 60kmh+ glide past Stanmer (no sign of kites but lots of bouncy castles etc), to get a better climb from the University while watching two pilots (I think Franco and another) floating about for a low save further north of the University and Dave Massie topping up nicely behind me.
Hang gliders were being aerotowed from the airfield and I skirted around Lewes losing height. Airworks student � or at least the vehicles � were visible on their Caburn field but then I was lured by some gulls circling above the cement works behind Lewes (and Craig higher above them). By the time I got to the cement works the birds had flapped off somewhere else and I failed to get any further height so I pushed over to the water meadows by the Cuilfail tunnel and landed.
A walk into Lewes, a train into Brighton and a bus up to the Dyke only to find |
