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Dateline: Tuesday 19^th Oct 2010

Dick Bradley, levers himself out of his venerable Ash25 and sends>>

Last night came and went at a rather nice fish emporium near Featherbrook Estate where we were offered a kilo of prawns for R120, an offer that was too good to refuse. I suspect that the garlic sauce is still going to be evident at briefing this morning. We were hoping that Brian Wilford, our friendly CAA liason officer, might turn up for a paper work inspection and we could all breath over him!

Yesterday didn't work out as well as we expected from the forecast. We were spiked by a lot of cirrus that started coming in mid morning and the temperature just didn't get up. We sent Herbert up top sniff at 12:30 he motored to 9000ft and slowly drifted down and eventually landed at 13:15. We could see popping to the south and west but while they were getting closer to the airfield they just remained out of range,

At 13:45 we sent Mr Impatience, Martin Atwell, off to see if conditions had improved and when he reported 2m through 8000ft we decided to launch the fleet. Conditions weren't easy but the base eventually went to 12 top 13k ft and we started at 14:30 to 14:45. The cirrus was the main factor and there was a particularly think band near the second turn point that made it particularly difficult and most of those that had motors used them to get back. We had two out landing, Stan Kwiatofski and Stefan VD Berg, but all ok.

So we look forward to day 3. A beautiful clear sky and the forecast was predicting a good day with high cu and the only problem being strong westerly winds. However when we did the thing that forecaster should never do, to go and look outside, and saw a whole sky full on altocu and nacent over development!

Dick