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Long weekend at Sutton Bank

Carol, Rod, Chris and myself have just got back from a great long weekend at Sutton bank.

The ridge was not working but we still manged to get in sime extended flights and during the three days we flew we had the longst flights of the day. Carol and I even got into some weak SE evening wave which kept us at 1500 ft for 1hr 35 minutes. I last flew at Sutton Bank back in 1997 and the site is just as good and the locals are very friendly.

Looks like we will be returning for another long weekend later this year or for a longer stay next spring. If you fancy coming along let me know.

Phil

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Slingsby week

A few of us had a good time at Sutton Bank a week or two ago at the Slingsby week. Alan P took the Skylark (clearly eligible), Rod took the Swales (not Slingsby, but Annex II and built in nearby Thirsk), Bill took the Ka6 (iffy but at least it’s vintage wood), and EUF syndicate took their Slingsby Owl, as Paul insists it is. John D, Bob, Alan B also came to fly, plus there were several wives and Andy and family looked in a few times during the week.


The first day was a winching day, with the wind on the ridge. It’s not like at Shalbourne – some people had terrible 80kt launches to 400ft before pulling off, everyone else let go even lower. Then those new to the site needed a bit of bottle to glide away from the landing area to find the lift. But the ridge was reliable and it was easy enough to climb high enough to get into thermal, some (not us) even got into the wave. Rod won the day’s duration prize – 3hrs in the Swales, off 3 launches with three different P2s. He had the log corrected (delete Swales, insert P****z) but not till after had drunk the prize. What a travesty.

High pressure then settled in, so no westerlies and unfortunately an October-type cloudy anticyclone, but we had a couple of days thermalling from aerotows. Alan collected the booby prize for shortest flight of 23mins – but remember at home that would often qualify as the longest flight. Of course, as soon as the weather saw us derigging at the end of the week, the wind finally went round onto the ridge.

But despite the poor ration of flying, it was a great week and a site to be thoroughly recommended.

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A long(ish) pause?

Hmm, the last post was over ten days ago. Has nothing happened? Well, no actually, not here anyway. We’ve had a run of windy and wet days, hardly flyable let alone soarable. The only days with a glimmer of hope were on days we weren’t open for flying. C’est la vie. Perhaps Pete can tell us how he got on at Gransden Lodge, where he was able to use a couple of days we weren’t flying.

It hasn’t been a lot better in Sweden, where Liz and Ayala have been competing in the women’s World Championships, along with three other British lasses. They only had five contest days out of a possible ten, due to the weather – it seems all our bad weather finished up there. And of those five days, only one was a half-decent racing day. So congratulations to them – in the Club Class, Ayala finished second, only just behind the winner, and Liz was fifth in a field of 18. But Liz was well and truly robbed on the last day – she completed 123k of a 137k task, but no one else reached 100k (though several made 99k), so it was a no-contest day. Big swizz.