TVHGC Flying Diary

I was going to head up to the bpcup, but the weather wasn't looking too promising, so decided to fly from Milk Hill, intially the wind was a little too far off to the south for Milk Hill itself, but Wallace, myself and Ken all boated about and got some climbs, but definetely weren't getting away.

I bit the bullet and tried to fly round to milk hill white horse and got drilled down before the fence, so had to walk round which sucked!

Got onto the face to find Wallace and Kirsty already there and then the 3 of us took off, I immediately headed off down the southerly face and found myself landing near the bottom of the hill just east of the white horse and so had to struggle back up before taking off again, although i took off into something quite meaningful which was nice.

By this time Kirsty and Wallace were well above and I tried to thermal under them with an Omega 6. Initially we were doing quite well and I thought we were going to get away with it, so kept turning for a while only to drop out of the bottom of the lift and then land about 500m behind the hill. The only bonus was a small leash of deer that were lying in the grass almost exactly where I was going to land.

I then struggled back again and cursed the sky as I could see Wallace boating along at cloudbase. I eventually got back to the correct bit of the hill and had a little bit of banter with Ian Pepper and Mike Long when suddenly everyone took to the air. I scrambled after them and saw 2 wings going for it, I scraped over the back below them (I must learn to leave hills with more height), after a bloodyminded 15 minutes scrapping around in weak and useless lift, I finally found something to get me up towards base, still a long way below Jason Smith who was thermalling irritatingly well above me.

Eventually I got to near base and the 2 of us headed off on a mini glide before topping up to base. Jason out thermalled me again, so much so that on the next glide I opened up my flight deck and emptied the 8ltrs of ballast I was carrying.

Unfortunately, the other glider disappeared off on his own and I think bombed out somewhere near Marlborough.

Jason and I then thermalled together and looked for lift together all the way to Oxford which we may have overflown a little below the 1000ft minimum as we were convinced we'd find a booming thermal, it wasn't to be, so we landed in a field just outside the city centre.

The weather is now looking good for Combe tomorrow, so good luck everyone!