| Flight details: | While on my way to the Dyke after a morning meeting with the accountant, I saw Windy John driving in the opposite direction. I pulled onto the side of the Kingston roundabout and called him for an explanation! He told me that is was off to the south and light there. I took a quick look up to see a magnificent sky developing and agreed to quickly head to Mt.Caburn.
John and I rigged half way up the school field and flew/ran to the top as Dave Nickells was just starting to gain some height. As this was my first flight on the new Independence reversible harness I had to make a few in flight adjustments, but soon settled into a smooth 2m/s climb under a superb looking convergence line. I drifted a kilometer or so ENE while climbing, but as soon as I approached base at 1500' curtain cloud started to form alongside and below me. Rather than risk envelopment I broke away to the cloud street to the north.
The rest of the flight followed a fairly similar pattern, with drift to the south east when climbing and glides heading north east under a steadily rising cloudbase which peaked at almost exactly 4000'. I was very conscious of the airspace clutter around Dungeness and felt that the drift and streeting was luring me towards them and the inevitable landing when approacing the coast. Consequently I kept pushing cross/into wind. The next concern was of course that I would push too far north and risk penetrating the ATZ at Headcorn, so I was relieved to see aircraft launching and landing several km to my north.
I had not expected to fly xc when I set out and consequently had no flying suit & only a warm jacket on and no gps. I spent much of the flight considering whether I should land while I could still operate the controls, but managed to just temper the frozen sensation on each glide, though realistically I don't think I could have flown much further.
The GPS issue had been worrying me until I remembered that my mobile phone (N95) has one built-in. I took the |
