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I got to Coombe Gibbet between about 12:30 and 1pm and was rather relieved to see a number of pilots in the air, as while travelling to the site from where I live, I saw very little sign of much wind. Once on the hill I noticed quite a few pilots sitting on the hill and a few in the air. The wind was on the strong side on the hill as I set up. I inflated the cage with no problems at all, the problems only started when I was immediately launched vertically into the air. I shouted a greeting to Mike Hibbit as I struggled to make some headway into the gust that I had found myself in. When I started to fly backwards I decided to abort that flight and pulled in my ears to start a descent. As the ears came in, sure enough I lost height but still couldn't penetrate forwards. I had a nice gentle touch down but unfortunately, fell or landed (I can't recall which) onto my backside. I deliberately tucked the front edge of the glider but couldn't turn round to stall it in time to stop it dragging me backwards and a worrying few seconds ensued with me eventually stalling the glider but falling onto my cage in the process. The fact that now, one of the cage handles was flat against the main part of the cage told me that I really shouldn't have done that. Closer examination revealed that I had damaged one of my fuse tubes, which is the cage equivalent of bending an upright on a hang glider. Luckily enough, JLD had given me two spare tubes which I had wisely brought with me. Rather less wise was the fact I had not brought either a spanner or an Allen key with which to make the change. Having asked around a few hang glider pilots who had watched me in mild amusement I eventually managed to borrow a spanner from 'Dave'. I spent the next hour or so working out how to remove and replace the aforementioned fuse tube using a spanner and a car key. From then on things got worse...well sort of. My next launch was more successful but after a few minutes flight, got too far up the hill again and found myself in the same position (will I never learn). Once again struggling to make headway and starting to go backwards I took the precaution of flying 'backwards', ie spinning on my hang point so that although the cage was going backwards I was actually facing forwards. However, control is always limited in this sort of position (the going backwards while facing forwards, position) so when I found myself heading towards a rather large gorse bush, made an equally large effort to land before I got there. Fortunately I did manage to land short of the gorse bush. Unfortunately my canopy didn't. Although the canopy itself cleared the back of the bush quite happily, it also quite happily managed to deposit most of the lines straight through the middle of the bush and I spent the next twenty minutes extracting them. It was at this point that I very seriously asked myself what the hell I was doing here today and that perhaps I should be somewhere that didn't have gorse bushes instead. Having parted company with the large gorse bush, which had very generously shared most of it's thorns with me I made sure I walked far enough down the hill to keep out of the venturi effect of the wind. A nice easy take off this time. I reverse launched, turned and away I was. From then onwards it became the perfect day. I played around in very lifty conditions for about an hour. During this time I could feel the thermals coming through and played around with them, flying further out from the hill than I would normally do and found it very easy. After flying for about an hour I suddenly found it very difficult to stay up and very quickly had to come in to slope land. It was only when I saw just about everybody else come down that I realised that the wind had just died completely and all but a couple of pilots had to land. After a while the wind picked up a little and after a few short hops I was airborne again, but this time only for about 20 minutes. On this flight though I managed to fly thermals properly for the first time. I followed a thermal to the top of the hill and a little behind, but then I lost it again and found myself sinking and I realised I wouldn't make it back to the slope and had to land on the flat top. I could see I wouldn't make it back over the tree slope so I carefully looked for the best place to land, totally ignored it, and landed in a field of nettles instead. No harm done though and I picked up my glider, rubbed my stinging leg and walked back to the slope and immediately took off again. This one was the flight of the day. Whilst it wasn't all easy flying, it had a good mix of good no-brains lift where I could go almost anywhere and some challenging flying where I might end up skimming the slope quite low down and have to work my way back up again. One of the climaxes of the day happened as the day was calming down in the early evening and there were just five or six of us left flying. In front of the ridge about 2km away, four balloons took off. One of them went for some height and went straight up. The other three kept low, and as they approached the ridge were barely off of the ground. They followed the contour of the hill to the top where myself, and two other pilots were flying and we had great fun flying around and between the balloons as they scaled the slope and I waved to the people in the basket as they were taking photo's of us. This made me kick myself for not having a camera with me as this was quite a spectacle. Once they reached the top of the hill, they got high and went on their way. I carried on flying until the wind again died and we landed. This was my best flight today by far with a 2 1/2 hour duration and nearly 900ft height gain from my take off point and got my first real thermal experience. A lot of people did personal bests on the same day as well and I'm now aching for another day like it, and also throbbing from the nettle stings.
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