Saturday started warm and sunny, and lots of members headed out to the airfield in spite of the BBC forecast saying it would be blue and hot. Late morning, Eric set off in Cosy Pajamas on a 300km attempt to Bury St Edmunds out and return -an ambitious but well thought out task. Alan L, Dave Smith & Russell, Graham P in 60 & John W in H20 also declared cross country tasks and disappeared offsite.
John Dono was in charge, with Clive & Paul Fletcher helping out with our trial lesson visitors. John did currency and AFR checks with Tez and Roger Tyrell, and did ab initio training with Stefanos (visiting from Greece), Mike M (recent temp member) and Joe Bowler - the latest in the line of Bowler pilots. Most of the xc pilots returned throughout the afternoon reporting that
conditions were /blue in places, and that vis wasn't great, task lengths
varying up to 280km. John R went for a late instrument testing flight in
EPU. Brent & Harry put the loaded Astir through its paces while Dave Price completed his xc endorsement soaring flights. Most of the trial lessons had soaring flights too so everyone got to fly and the four club gliders out were kept busy.
The day got steadily hotter and it is to the credit of all three instructors that they were still standing at 18:30pm when we packed in the day due to general exhaustion at the launchpoint. Here we are sheltering from the sun towards the end (note no gliders - all in the air):
Then just as we were about to pack up the launchpoint (final aerotow), a glider was seen landing in a field in the distance, over by Upton House. Rowan checked it out via the tug on his way back to the airfield and confirmed that it was Eric, as yet unaccounted for. A team went to collect Eric while we all pondered the distance to Bury St Edmunds and whether this would be a close miss, given that BSE O/R is only 302.6km and Eric was at least 1km away from site!!! (You don't need to get back to claim a 300km gold distance, though it doesn't count as a diamond goal)
Eric elected to leave the loggers till the next day, and concentrate on the retrieve and feeding the crew that evening. Here are a couple of shots of the field that Stephanie took :
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And here is a shot I took from the air the following day - it's the field to the left of the lake:
So on Saturday we had the longest task by the lowest performance glider going xc, and a well deserved Gold Distance for Eric in CPJ! What a result! Well done Eric.
