With the wind forecast at to be from 140 at 15kts, rising to 30kts with height, there was legitimate expectation that wave would be in place, just off the end of the winch launch, ready and willing to fling us all to great heights with little or no effort on our part.
Or so it seemed. That assumption was, however, pretty wide of the mark: patience, perception and persistence were to be the watchwords for the day.
With no gourmet breakfast to delay us we got off to an early start, Roger Applekist rounding the corner just after 8am with this K-6CR fresh from soaring the ridges at Talgarth (where he was checked out for aerotow and landing on postage stamps!), closely followed by Juniors Andrew and Mike and Bob Pirie, who had obviously read the forecast and got his Mothering Sunday duties out of the way before advancing his clocks! (What a country?! We celebrate our debt to our Mums by depriving them of an hour's sleep!)
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| An uninspiring sky - no clues about the presence of wave |
The launch point already set up by the Saturday crew enabled us to make ready relatively swiftly and Andrew took the K-8 directly after the first K-13 launch. Sadly, there was just not enough upward boundness to get us into the wave, which tantalisingly delivered small patches of zero and large pools of 4 down at 1200ft!
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| K8 ready to go |
Whilst our launch rate did not quite match that of an American aircraft carrier, we did manage to get Bob in the Pirat, Jerry in the K-8 and myself in the K-13 with Darren Wills and Jeff Cragg airborne before lunchtime. At which point, problems with the winch took us back to that old familiar - single cable operation – for a period while Scratch and Roger wrestled yards of cable that appeared to have gone into 'auto-serpent' - off the drum self coiling – mode. Thanks to them and Jerry Wellington taking on the winch driving we managed to continue flying until they could get both drums back in operation.
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| On Approach |
With arrival of the afternoon the wind, if anything, increased in strength, setting up a long wavelength lenticular downwind of Sourton Down, frustratingly too far away, thus dashing hopes that the wave was to be… Until, after a launch failure each for Trevor Taylor and Andrew Swann (Andrew's an ultra low level insufficient power release he handled with breathtaking self confidence), they both got the springboard they were hoping for (in Andrew's case to 1,400ft) that enabled them to make contact. And thus they remained, apparently stuck to the sky at 2,500ft whilst we on the ground could only look on in wonder for what seemed like hours – in fact for Andrew it was 57 minutes before he landed – but that was because he had forgotten to set his watch – the watch his granddad had bought especially - so he use the timer to record his hour..! Round again, Andrew!
Thanks go to the team who kept the show on the road today, in particular Roger, Scratch and Darren – for whilst there was plenty of quiet patience at one end of the airfield, there was probably a lot of swearing at the other!
Martin Cropper
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