Wednesday 7th August “Dodging the showers”

Despite numerous showers during the day, members enjoyed a day of two seater training, check flights, solo flights, intrepid thermal hunting and plenty of cups of tea, briefings and social “chit chat” in the caravan between the “wet stuff” falling from the sky.                                                                                   Many thanks to our volunteer winch man, Dave P. Mike J and Steve L for covering the instruction for the day.

Chris Chappell 

4 thoughts on “Wednesday 7th August “Dodging the showers””

  1. More of those Convergences.

    You may be interested in two You Tube videos I’ve uploaded of a run under a convergence on this Wednesday in the Venture. I picked it up at Gillingham at about 15.30 and ran it, engine off, from Shaftesbury to Sherborne and then back to Shaftesbury. Cloudbase was quite low at about 2300 QFE but the lift was strong. I ran it in 4 knots of lift in the Venture occasionally having to speed up to over 60 knots to reduce the climb rate or get sucked into cloud.

    The first clip shows part of the run westwards, some in falling rain. You might be able to pick out the lake at Sherborne in the distance. The run back east started lower at about 1500 feet as I’d run out of the end of the convergence and doubled back. (I was over 2000ft AGL at Henstridge. Altimeter was set to Park QFE.) Straight line flying with no turning at all along the southern side of a long black cloud street. Lots of fun. What else is out there to discover….

    You tube video clips are at https://youtu.be/ITapAxzn4pI and https://youtu.be/2C8RjZ3cw0g They’re too big to upload to the Blog directly

    2. Gliding dreams are made of energy lines, like the dark based line of cloud in your second video ‘Going East’ 🙂.

      Is this the common later stage of a convergence? Does the right angled step between the two fronts disappear and merge into one flat bottomed energy line later in their development?

      1. I don’t claim full knowledge Damien, but you may have noticed that there is a step in the “going west” video at one point. Both were under the same energy line at different places about 5 miles and 15 minutes apart, so both can happen. Join up the dots and look for lines! A big clue to making rapid progress in gliding.

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