The weather: “cloudy but dry with cloudbase rising to 1,800ft amsl by 1200
local”; should have allowed us to get some launches in at around lunchtime and
into the afternoon (Brentor being 820ft above amsl). The reality of “cloudy but
dry” was that we were within the cloud as much as out of it, and when out of it
the drizzle was persistent. So once again we turned to Dave Downton to exercise
his diplomacy skills in postponing today’s One Day Course and re-booking our
Trial Lessons.
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Anyone seen rain falling upwards?"
"Water droplets spotted on the underside of the K-8’s wing. |
Meanwhile, we set about finding useful things to do (in the wet). Such as,
why is there no neutral light on the quad bike? (Roger Appleboom on removing
offending item said he would replacement it with one from his garage stores);
why are there droplets of water on the underside of the gliders’ wings in the
hangar (a very timely question put just as a blast of Wagner announced Colin
Boyd’s arrival in the Green Machine).
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| Peter Howarth cutting the lighter grass in the mist. |
Answer, the hangar doors were left open
during a rain shower yesterday afternoon. And can we mow the grass? Well perhaps
just the light stuff can be kept a bay – thanks to Pete Howarth for that. We
also had great fun digging out one of the strimmers from the pile of ‘It’s no
good to us but I’m sure the gliding club would like it’ stuff and (after a lot a
semi-H&S compliant tweaking) getting it to work. This enabled Roger
Appleboom to go on a voyage of discovery for the yellow warning sign that used
to caution drivers about driving down the slope to the hangar with gliders
attached. After 10 minutes intense strimming the sign re-emerged from the tangle
of grass and is now re-transmitting its safety message.
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| Roger Appleboom with strimmer rediscovers the south side safety sign. |
Excitement of the day was the arrival of a new glider on site, courtesy of
Alan Carter and Roger Green who having captured a new prize in the shape of a
Zugvögel 3B, had brought it all the way from Essex, thus giving us two on site
and one third of the UK’s population of the Scheibe built 17m gliders. It also
provided evidence of another growing trend at Brentor: members with two gliders
– Alan with his (worryingly similar) SF-27, Roger with his ASW-20, plus the
aforementioned Zugvögel 3B (with which Steve Lewis is also to be a syndicate
member), Roger Appleboom with his K-6CR plus Club Libelle and, until recently,
Dave Parker with his K-6CR and Std Cirrus. The rationale for this multi-asseted
ownership is, of course, our relative remoteness for those cross-country pilots
domiciled in the West Country who nonetheless want to fly all through the year
(keep your hot ship up country and a hack in Devon).
There were two interesting spots (in addition to the rain) today: first, two
deer (one adult one juvenile) in the woodland over the south side fence (smiley
face), they seemed quite happy watching us watching them; the second, cow pats
on the airfield (grumpy face).
Martin Cropper
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