My Flying

Day 2 - Friday

Day two was a whole lot more relaxed than the rush of the previous day, what with driving to Graaff-Reinet, rigging the planes and so on.

The weather looked promising in the morning but pretty soon some nasty inversion took over and the small cu's that had formed disappeared. Later that afternoon a light south easterly picked up and I hoped into a Falke with one of the experienced pilots to go scout the ridges.

Once I was in the air, and with the luxury of an engine, I managed, for the first time, to have a good look around at the ground close to the airfield to look for landed spots should there be a low eventually behind the tug. Should runway 20 be used there is lots of nice open ground just before the dam, so that is good. Should runway 02 be used it does look a lot less favourable. Not far away are some fields but they are small and fenced off - Not so good. Should runway 33 be used there is some bushy flat land just north of the runway. Not ideal but one should be able to put the plane down without damage to one's person.

So once we were back on the ground we all organised the gliders, hoped into and were towed to a nice ridge 15km away downwind (like 10 to 20 kph so nothing serious).

I spent the next 1.5 hours having lots of fun exploring the different faces of this ridge and even hoping over to another ridge close by to experiment. I got in some quality time with the 20 and enjoyed myself. When the day started getting later and the sun started to set the wind slowly died down and me and the remaining guy on the ridge headed for home.

The circuit was interesting an challenging. The other guy got there about 1km ahead of me and about 400 feet higher and I decided to hang around and give him space to land, though I did request him to land deep (never happened). All this was made more fun by an impatient motor glider that wanted to depart and that by the time I had turned base (like 300 ft) the other glider had just rolled off the runway. This gave me place to land shallow and I did a great job of just skimming over the runway lights on the threshold for my first landing on tar. It went off well and I ended up having plenty of place and let the glider roll as far as possible down the tar on its own steam.

Though not the successful thermalling day that I had hoped for, I still got in a good aerotow, some nice ridge flying and a great (crowded) circuit and landing.