Colin returned from the weather check reporting "lift everywhere" and having to side-slip along the downwind leg. The advice to his syndicate partner - "it's worth rigging". LS3 rigged and the word from Colin in the back seat was "sorry, it's as if there's been a complete change of air". Alan P had been airborne for some time so something must be working. Straight off the launch into a reasonable thermal which stopped dead at 2,000' by the inversion. No matter, plenty more where that came from, or so I thought. Nothing found to impede my inevitable descent to Mother Earth. Launch number 2 turned into an epic scratch - half an hour off only 2 thermals, each providing a gain in height of 500', gives an idea of just how feeble the climb rate was. All good character forming stuff I suppose. Mine was the second longest flight of the day, beaten by Alan P with over an hour in his Skylark. How he managed that length of time is a mystery (especially, it was suggested, given the soaring ability demonstrated on the previous couple of flying days - one wag observed that maybe he should stick to yellow aircraft and avoid blue) but impressive.
The day ended prematurely when the intermittent problem on with the winch was no longer intermittent and the starter motor gave up.
I promise the sky was full of emergent cu when I did the weather check - honest!. Atoned for my bad advice by fixing the winch.
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