Sunday 15th January 2012

“Wave?? - Wossadd??” “Wave? Iss like, well, wave innid, yunnow, goes up an dahn, dunnit – Yer can’t seeit, feelit, tuchit, but if you gah dahn Dartmoor Gliding in an Easterly an ya take a winch launch id’ll be there, juss’ like Ronseal innit: it does wut id sez on the tin.”

Except today was a southerly – so no chance, the wind blowing almost exactly 90 degrees across the runway, pretty strong, and verrryy cold. Just the day for a silliest hat competition! Sponsored by resident expert and retired GP Robin Wilson, who said ’There are some people wandering around without hat’s on – they’ve got to be absolutely stupid!’, and led CFI Don Puttock, who had to send all the way to Australia for his stupid hat, Sandra Buttery recorded all hats on parade on video and came up with the winner – as they say ‘You’ve got to be in it (the hat, that is) to win it!’

And so to the first flight and, lo and bloody behold, the K-13 is glued to the sky! Analysis from the chart shows that the surface wind was around 170 degrees, at 2000ft around 160 and a height another 10 degrees backed – so it was just clipping the western edge of Dartmoor and yet sufficient for us to launch directly into smooth wave to 3, 4 or even more thousand feet, as Jacob Knight (check flight-first 2 launches), Scratch (1hr), Jeff Cragg (2hrs+), Robin Wilson (1hr), Nigel Williamson (1hr), Roger Applebloom (40mins), Luke (20mins - beating his longest flight to date by 13 mins) and John Ashby (40 mins) will be able to tell you. And Trevor Taylor 2hrs 15 minutes to 8400 feet. Not the highest - that was me at 9200 feet.

Above Brentor looking north

If thanks go to anyone (in particular) they go to Don Puttock for realising that it was a ‘Ronseal‘ day: the wave was there - and then enabling trainees to enjoy it (including the low level rotor!) It was one of those days without thermals, visitors, cable breaks or breakdowns: just us pitting ourselves against nature - in the form of gravity - with nature - in the shape of the wind - to achieve what we like best about Brentor: flying with no engine, to improbable heights.

The view from 4000 ft today

Martin Cropper