Saturday 21st February

It's a cold February morning and Graham and Paul (F) are our duty instructors. There was a fairly strong north westerly so we decide to get three gliders out, the K21, CCC  and the sport England K8 to make the most of the ridge.  First up are Graham and Robin in the K21 to give Robin a refresher in glass of the type you fly in! Then Bruno takes HLH for a flight test and after spinning it a few times to see if he can shake anything off, which it appears he cannot, goes off for a few minutes on the ridge before returning and declaring the aircraft serviceable. 

 

 

There are plenty of takers for the K8 as Alistair, Lech, Brent, Richard Allen, Derrick and Paul all having a flight with Derrick setting the longest flight of the day at 38 minutes.  Meanwhile Paul was instructing Daniel Earl taking four flights in CCC while Graham flew six flights with Maciej (Magic) in the 21. Jon (L) then took the last flight in CCC and we put the toys to bed.

Alistair Frier 

Dinner Postscript

.....sad to report that the tailplane fell off the 'Richard Cranium' award on the way home!! Good thing that I have some superglue to hand.....

SGC Dinner Dance 2015-Saturday 14th February

This year we headed to the Whately Hall Hotel in Banbury once more for our Annual Dinner Dance. We sat down to a wonderful three course meal, followed by a talk by Gavin Preuss, going through memorable flights in his log book. Thank you, Gavin. This was followed by speeches, prize-giving, a raffle and then dancing. Congratulations to all the prize winners:

CFIs Award: Tim Treadaway
Highest Achiever: Alan Langlands
Best Flight: Graham Paul
Most Improved Pilot: Bob King
Clubman of the Year (Geoff Webster Trophy): Derrick Sandford
Services to the Club (Paul Gibbs Trophy): Mary Meagher
Richard Cranium Award: John and Tess Whiting

Smart tuggies...

A sensible bunch...

A silly bunch...

I'm not kidding you...the lens was THIS big!

The Young Ones...

Tess with one of the seven...

Oh dear...broke the Richard Cranium Award already!!!

Prize-giving...

Sunday 1st February

I didn’t get to the club until Sunday morning myself, but there must be some authors who can tell us about the flying on Saturday? I did hear that a launch of 1950 ft was achieved in the splendid ridge wind that day. It was not quite so kind on Sunday, but when we not repairing cables we had at least 3 flights of an hours duration in the K21 each.

Apparently it was less turbulent on Sunday, so we were doubly blessed even though our launch heights were only 1400, but then who needs launch height with a wind like that?

When we reminisced about ridge flying we concluded that there had been at least 4/5 superb ridge days in the past few weeks, a ridge season par excellence. Sunday’s was my 4^th significant ridge run since 20^th December.

No photos I’m afraid, unless Dave H can be persuaded to download his.

Eric  NTD