Advance paragliders in the West Country

Edit 03/06/2015 Llangorse is a SEW Club site and shouldn’t be flown (not that you’ll be able to find this information on their website, so I advise to treat this information just like any other information you come across on the Internet and check for yourself). 

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Having missed out on the the epic conditions in the Black Mountains on Friday 10th August  (see Guy Anderson’s tracklog from his 60km triangle here) whilst camping on the coast near Weymouth, and having not flown my solo glider in the UK since 19th June (!), I was desperately keen to get another XC flight in before the end of the season, which fingers crossed won’t be for another few weeks.

So, after my usual indecision (Westbury? Milk Hill? Batcombe? Llangorse? Frocester?), I met up with Declan, Paddy and Ben at Aust and we headed over the Severn to Llangorse where we met up with Ken, Ben, Dr Mike, Graham, Joe and Stephen. RASP wasn’t forecast to be as good over in Wales compared to Westbury and Milk (the wind direction was much more suited to Llangorse though), and the lack of sunshine on the ground out in front of the hill bore testament to this.

Having said that, there are worse places to soar for an hour waiting for something to come through – it really is a beautiful hill. Eventually a brief spell of sunshine worked its magic and Ken, Graham, Declan, Stephen, Ben, Joe and I all climbed up in a fairly weak climb which eventually topped out at about 4,400′.

We all meandered our way across the Black Mountains enjoying the wonderful views but the Pontrilas Danger Area was looming up ahead. It’s only 4nm across but it doesn’t half get in the way!

We all opted to head to the south of it, and sure enough we all ended up scattered between the Old Pandy Inn on the A465 and where I landed near Kentchurch.

In hindsight perhaps we should have tried to get round to the north of it – maybe next time I’ll try that, or else make a jump south onto Magic Mountain early on so that the rest of the flight is easier… However it was a very pleasant two hour flight over beautiful scenery, and very nice to finally get some UK airtime after such a long layoff.

Here’s a great video Declan made of his flight…

Tracklog here.