Shalbourne Gliding – OLD WEBSITE
A friendly gliding club in Wiltshire
Claire treated her Libelle to an outing on Monday which prompted Richard to ask if it blinked when it was pulled from its trailer still sleeping, what did he mean by that???
Well if it was sleeping it soon woken up as shortly after this photo was taken Carol and I saw it brushing against the clouds at over 4,000ft!
And now for something completely different………
What’s this? A posting for bank holiday? The weather is never any good on bank holidays.
Well, never say never. The weather forecast was excellent – or rather the forecast was for excellent weather, the weather itself was a bit slow to do do as forecast.
Anyway, there were several gliders rigged and parked up by the launch point by about 1100, ready for the forecast thermals to pop off. We kept throwing two-seaters at the sky, but they all fell off straight away, so Trevor went for a snifter in the K8 and hung on for half-an-hour in weak wave – aha! there’s the problem, the wave was spoiling the thermals. We kept throwing gliders at the sky and some of them took a while to fall down again, until eventually at 1415, three hours later than expected, Jim went off in the Nimbus and did not return. After that, the next ten all soared away (with the ignoble exception of one) and mostly went off on XCs to Devizes and Wantage, or Didcot. Trevor finally got round to rigging and took the last launch of the day at 1745 to show us it was all still working, landing at 1900 so we could go home.
And the forecast for the day….Not brilliant.
I turned up, Bob turned up, Trevor turned up and Alan Petite turned out collect his glider and take it to Sutton Bank.
We set up, cancelled a trial lesson booked for the afternoon and waited for the trial lesson to turn up at 11am.
By 11:15am the cloud base looked lower and the clag looked thicker but the couple who’d booked the TL arrived and we pushed the young lady into the Puchacz,
2 cables, one screamer, which I assure you I heard all the way to 1600 feet, more surprising as Bob was flying!
Bob landed with pin point precision, stopping for me to take one step forward, grab the wing tip and hook them back on to take the remaining cable. The young lady screamed but I couldn’t hear her after about 700 feet.
The flew around, landed and she exclaimed it was ‘brilliant!!’
They left and so did we after packing everything away.
Thanks to Alan for staying to help get the TL off the ground.
Taken last Sunday this is a photo of the crop circle that Steve mentioned in his post.
