Its been a good week really, when we get cold frosty dry weather like this and flyable N/W winds . I get a litte excited at the very thought of going to the Moorfoots.
And so it was back there today again. Arrived to find the light wind at the carpark on around 280 to 300 degrees at best so I walked in to the west to access the better face`s.
Sean turned up and I launched and found it easy to stay in the air, but the breeze was only working properly on the west face`s so we were staying put for a while on this one.
A few folk turned up and the soarable breeze dropped to scratchy. After a good 30min things had not improved and I was thinking about other things I could have been doing ( sometimes this is a bad idea) . Things started to improve slightly and a little bit of altitude was gained, I came close to using this to bolt back and get as close to the car as possible, but something said no.
Dave Thompson had joined me on a couple of beats earlier and had continued on along the ridge and landed halfway up, and although it took him a while and no doubt a sweat would be on he made it round the corner and started to get some height.
Things just changed and it became easy to soar along to the West end getting higher all the time, the secret was to slow down and hang in the lifty bits, it was slow but we were up over 2000ft, not massive but ok.
Generally very smooth with loads of time to get a right good look round at various hills over the back and way out to Tinto. after a good while I felt things were dropping of a bit so decided to go back east, back to the car. Other folk had arrived and I passed pilots on various slopes as I cruised east. Unfortunately they were just to late for the show.
So I arrive back at the carpark and soar about for a short while and it just switched off. I landed and packed in the same snow I had disturbed
on Monday.
The bummer was the fact that it had also switched off for the few folk at the other end of the ridge, and they were forced down into the bottom
with a significant walk back, but thats their story.
I feel I have made some progress with my flying of late and a small amount of confidence is seeping back.
Tommy.
