| Flight details: | After a brief and broken night's sleep in a Dorset layby, I turned up bleary-eyed at Bell Hill and got a text saying it was flyable in Sussex after all. Doh! Anyway, I was co-opted into the Sussex team for the BCC round, probably on the grounds that my six-seater van with tea-making facilities would make an excellent team retrieve vehicle.
Gliders were already high before 0900. I had a 20-minute boat about in the strong wind and top landed to find out the task -- go as far as possible! Launching again about 1030, I followed a bird into a climb but it shot over the back far too quick for me to follow. I stuck with the climb, which was slow, drifting back and constantly wondering if I should head back to the hill -- as the only other pilot with me did. But, I thought, I'm still going up, and eventually I reached base, and decided that this was it -- I'd never make it back now.
The next cloud downwind looked as good as mine, but by the time I got to it, it had dissipated, and my glide was quite sinky. I was expecting to bomb out at the first village -- Winterbourne Stickland, I think -- but from about 600 feet got a hint of a climb that took me on a kilometre or two. Then I got a proper climb, back to near base, and from then on it was easy.
Good clouds were plentiful and near each other. My only worry was Bournemouth airspace -- at one stage I was trying to read my air map and my GPS map together while thermalling, and the GPS was set so that the map kept going round and round. But once I had the westernmost tip of Poole harbour in sight, I knew I was ok for air space.
Everything worked as it should -- big quarry-type workings gave strong climbs, as did the town of Wareham. I could occasionally see, far in front of me and high, the only glider that had set off ahead of me. By the time I was over Corfe Castle, I was catching him up as he played in the sea breeze convergence, moving upwind to the west. I thought he must be one of the local skygods -- as |
