August |
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Tuesday 14th August 2001 At last! A chance to fly after the long break due to the foot and mouth disease. I had almost given up hope of flying this year. Anyway I went down to Milk Hill for the first time only to find the wind too strong to fly and on the north ridge rather than in the bowl. There were a couple of other pilots there waiting so I decided to stick around for a while, as the wind was only slightly stronger than I cared to fly and there was a good chance it would drop off later on. This it did about 2 1/2 hours later and I took off (after a messy inflation attempt which made me realise I was a little rusty) and got a couple of minutes in the air. It wasn't an epic day, but I did do a few flights of up to 15 mins and clocked up about 45 mins or so through the afternoon. It was a good day just to get me back into the swing of flying. Monday 20th August 2001 Milk hill looked on again today so I wasted no time in getting down there. Well yes I did in fact, I never can get out of bed early! There were about 3 other pilots there. It was quite a frustrating day with lots of short (2 min) flights as the wind kept dropping, forcing landing, but I was happy with the fact I only landed down once so didn't have too much walking uphill to do. As time went on the wind got a little smoother and we managed to get slightly longer flights in but the wind would still let us down at the last moment forcing landing. One of the pilots entertained us with a nice little dash to the field behind take off to land smack bang in the middle of the largest crop circle in the area with an audience of sightseers taking video and photos. In fact all of us, along with the crop circles were quite a focal point for the tourists and none of us escaped attention. My best moments were during a nice little 15 minute flight when I flew out of the front of the hill and for the first time was consciously flying the thermals coming from the fields in front. I wasn't turning circles but 'S' turned to try to stay in them for as long as possible and got to over 400ft above take off. A crowning achievement for me. Later on in the same flight, while attempting to 360 in a thermal, I fell out of it above the cornfield and got pinned, so the only option was down. I ended up in the same crop circle but in one of the outer rings. A few more short flights later and I decided to call it a day, but happy with what I'd done. Back
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