Sunday 6th September

With a bright forecast and a rapidly filling flying list reflecting a group of Club members keen to fly, the hangar doors were open well before 9:00 with the four available two-seaters, the Junior and K6CR soon out and the field being set up for the day.
Preparing the gliders (Mike Sl)
With the launch point in the South East corner it was a short walk with the gliders and then flying was soon underway for the day.

A good forecast meant that it was no surprise that a number of private gliders were soon being rigged albeit that the sky did not look as promising as the forecast perhaps suggested it might be.

However as the morning progressed, the sky steadily became more interesting so soon private gliders were starting to take launches into an improving sky.

During the day the flying list was steadily worked through with several trial lessons also completed including two 'mile high' flights.

Congratulations to Jess who converted to the K6......
Jess flies K6 (Graham H)
....... and to Matthew who converted to the Lak. 
Matthew flies Lak12
Most of the private gliders settled for local soaring as the 2300ft cloudbase, weak thermals and almost blue conditions weren't conducive to flying far, although John P in HOG turned Beaminster, and Pete St 230  and Phil in 611, went looking for the forecast convergence on the south coast which didn't make an appearance! Late in the afternoon, the clouds reappeared and bases rose to 3000ft.

By the end of the day when the hangar doors were closed at just after 18:30, the flying stats for the day reflected what a good day it had been with 52 launches completed-
(37 winch and 15 aerotow) for total flying time of just under 47 hours and with 9 flights over 2 hours

A particular thank you to the small number of members who completed long(er) stints on the winch than might normally be expected due to the limited available number of approved winch drivers and also to Peter St who stood in for Robert at short notice and completed 15 aerotows during the day. - Mike Sl

News from Mountain Soaring Competition, Aboyne

Today was the first proper comp day, a 205k task was set down towards Portmoak. We started with a reasonable climb but had to stop climbing because of a low min start height. We set off south having to go way off course to get to the wave, even with 60:1 glide ratio we struggled to get there arriving a thousand feet above the gnarly mountains, a bit of flying around in some really rough rotor thermals allowed us to contact a steady 1.5 knots to about 12,000'. 
A bit close to the gnarly mountains (Liam)
We pushed on and managed to climb up to 15,000' at the TP which put us way over glide. Heading home we contacted some ridiculous rotor and some off the clock climbs, but yet there were still people on the ridges scratching in the weeds, which is somewhere we didn't want to be (the field landing options are non-existent). We came 11th overall for the day.- Liam