Blue sky day today with surface winds in the SE, initially light but backing to the east and strengthening later. Regular readers will know that with any east in the forecast we generally get at least a little excited about the chances of wave. But the soundings were not encouraging, showing a stable airmass with a low inversion ( 1500 ft?). RASP was showing no appreciable thermal activity.
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This was the view from the launchpoint at 1.30 pm
No obvious signds of lift anywhere |
The other complication for today was that duty instructor Rick Wiles needed to leave early at 2pm to go on holiday. So an early start was in order. Earlier in the week the target for first launch was set to 9.30am. This was amended at the briefing to 10am and Rick took the first flight at 10.10am. Not bad.
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| Visitor Paul Thomas |
We welcomed visitor Paul Thomas who attended for a 2 flight Introduction to gliding. Paul flew with me and during our first launch we found some signs of weak wave to the east of the airfield. Our second flight we concentrated in maximising the weak wave found in our first flight following a beat from Mary Tavy south to the campsite at Peter Tavy and back. This kind of flying can be extremely challenging with the variometer needle hovering around zero most of the time. Care has to be taken not to lose any of the hard won height gains. So accurate flying along the beat and turning before running off the ends into the sink are the order of the day. The maximum height gained in our 24 minute flight was 200 ft above launch height to 1350ft. This represents a climb rate of about 0.15 knot average. Not meteoric but great fun anyway. To put this into context, my highest average climb rate on a strong wave day at Brentor was 27.8 knots to 7500 ft.
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| Ged and Phil in the Twin Astir waiting to try their luck |
Only 2 privateers joined us today. Ged and Phil got the Twin Astir out encouraged by my soaring in the K13. Richard Roberts also rigged his Discus. The club fielded a K8 along with the 2 K13's
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| Mike waiting to launch the K8 |
Longest flight of the day was a 40 minute effort by Richard Roberts flying his Discus. He initially used the same beat as I had earlier ( north - south ) but found another going SW - NE towards the higher Tors. This was probably set off by the southerly part of the SE wind. This bar was just a large area of zero with the top at just 1400 ft. Was the maximum height controlled by the low inversion? Interesting.
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Who needs a parasol to shelter from the sun?
Richard uses the K13 wing instead while Rita and Rick suffer in the heat. |
Rick got through his flying list in an expeditious manner and was last seen being dragged out of the gate by his wife while trying to change into his holiday clothes. That's dedication Rick.
Elsewhere on the airfield the project to move the T21 trailer took another step forward as the first of the twin axles were fitted and the trailer was moved to the rigging line freeing up the area behind for the intended MT storage area. Owners Chris and Karon Matten have been helped with this by Scratch and Rick in previous weeks.
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| The T21 trailer. Chris was helped by camera shy Scratch. |
Today we also took delivery of 2 new (to us) vehicles donated to the club by Scratch. There is a Nissan Nivara Pick up destined to be our work vehicle towing cables etc.and a Jeep Grand Cherokee which will be used for personel transportation. More detains and photos to come in a later blog.
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Heather was cleaning her new cable tow vehicle when a vacuum failure intervened.
Ged is obviously an expert in these domestic machines. Who knew? |
A good day.
Steve
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