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Recent Exped to Portmoak

As you may (or not) know some of us spent a week at Portmoak back in early October and it’s fair to say we all had a great time flying in ridge, thermal and weak wave. I personally logged over 10 hours of flying during our stay.

Portmoak (SGU) kindly offered us the use their Perkoz for one afternoon and during this time I had flights with Andrew, Bob and John. We were all surprised how nice it is to fly and especially how quite it is. The Perkoz is a great improvement over the Puchacz, 78kts on the winch and a VNE of about 145kts!

Hopefully the attached photos will encourage others to join us on these expeditions in future………….. btw the next one is probably at Camphill around Easter 2023 and another to Milfield is already booked for next October but more on this later 🙂 If you fancy coming along just let me know and we will see if we can arrange to take a Puchacz with us.

Bob flying the Perkoz
What can I say……….
Bob in his LS4
Nice sundog!
Andrew in the Perkoz
John flying the Perkoz
The obligatory sunset pic.

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Thursday 17th – another ridge day

Clear blue sky and a wind from the north – what more could one ask for? First launch was Bob B in the Vega and only returned 32 minutes later. first flight in the K8 was Ken P who pipped Bob’s time by 1 minute. With on 2 names on the instruction list and 4 instructors I got a chance to jump in the K8. Lively launch which I needed to abandon because an excess of speed – so only 2,000′. At 1,600′, in the bowl, I encountered lift too strong to be ridge lift so I thermalled away to over 2,500′. Time to get back to the ridge, arriving back there at 1,400′.


Lots of the 26 launches were extended but top dog honours went to Ken R with 1:14. All this plus Tony P’s excellent home baked brownies.

I will just mention that on the day we flew last week (9th) we clocked up more launches than had been flown in an entire January in 2 previous years but when it came to flying time it was better than achieved in 5 previous January’s!

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Wednesday 9th Jan – Ridge day

Shalbourne Gliding ridge day

Normally at this time of year it’s all about who can do a double digit flight.  Not so today.  Out of the 35 launches (yes, 35!) only 5 were less than 10 minutes (and of those one was a training launch failure and the other a hangar lob).  So, today’s benchmark duration was 1 hour and both flights in the Duo Discuss and both in the LS3-17 exceeded an hour.  In addition to these two glider the Skylark was rigged and all 5 of the club fleet were busy.

Shalbourne Gliding ridge day

A steady, but hardly fierce, wind from the north provided ridge lift and triggered the occasional thermal.  My first 2 flights of the day (in the back seat of each Puchacz) was to 2,000′.  Chris K reported a launch to 2,300′ solo in EUF but I didn’t hear any reports of what launch heights were achieved in the K8,  gotta have been good.

24 folks got to sample this exceptional day and clocked up just 12 minutes shy of 14 hours of flying time.  At the end of the day we were treated to a glorious sunset.

Shalbourne Gliding sunset