We had a great day at the airfield on Saturday. The day was forecast to be sunny and pleasant (if cold) and sure enough a large number of members made it to the airfield in anticipation of a decent flying day. We had a few hiccoughs first thing - just about every vehicle wouldn't start in the cold so there was lots of too-ing and fro-ing with WD40 and jump leads! Those of us without mechanical minds decided to start the year well and take the opportunity to wash some of our fleet - we cleaned CCC, DVX and HLH until they positively gleamed.
The duty instructors were Ray and Russell - it was good to see Ray back in a glider after an enforced absence due to a nasty car accident. The wind was almost on the short hard runway, but in the end we elected to operate one wire off the North south run, accepting the crosswind but landing on the hard to avoid obstructing the take off run. This worked pretty well (thanks Ray & Russell!), and after a slow start we had a good launch rate given the length of the day, managing 26 launches and quite a bit of soaring.
Some of you may remember Sandi (Kidd that was, now Rothwell) who used to fly at Shenington back in the 1990s. Sandi went back to New Zealand in 2002, but is visiting us with her daughter Isabelle (our Goddaughter), and she joined us at the airfield briefly on Saturday. We were thrilled to be able to get Isabelle in the air to see what Mum used to do, and Sandi was able to catch up with Mary, Gary, and some of the other 'old guard' who all happened to be around on Sat. She says hello to those who remember her.
Many of us had our first chance to fly the Sports England K8, and in fact her first flight on Saturday with Paul Fletcher was over an hour. I hadn't taken Paul all that seriously when he asked if he could have it for a couple of hours, so it was very kind of him to abandon the thermals/ridge and bring it back for the rest of us after only an hour! I had a brief flight later in the day and thought HLH was lovely. The gliders were kept busy right until they started misting up, and only got one of them stuck briefly in the wet muddy grass - see evidence below!!
The late afternoon sun provided an excellent way to see the ridge and furrows at the bottom of the hill....take note all ridge fliers! The area around Tysoe looks particularly stripey...
But as you can see the airfield is pretty dry given the amount of rain we've had recently, though we still need to keep off the grass where possible.
Just about everyone flew except for afternoon LPC Bob P, who was busy directing operations. A fair number of people had extended flights on the ridge, though the longest flight of the day went to Paul Fletcher with 69 minutes. Not bad for January!
Thanks to all who helped out with retrieves, logging, winching and launching - we all had a very jolly day. As dusk drew on we rinsed out the glider wheel boxes in case of mud and put the toys to bed.
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