02/05/04
Page 14

A short evening flight to blow away the cobwebs

It's hard to believe that I haven't flown since last Oct, 6 months ago. A combination of work, weather and bout of colds and flu have kept me on the ground since then. It was time to fly again and tonight was a lovely evening on the south coast.

Graeme Blakemore was with me today on his Booster powered Discovery. I was flying my Wasp/K4 as usual. We launched out of my favourite takeoff field about a mile north of the coast and just east of Brighton. Graeme launched first and I followed about two minutes later. I had some trouble getting my legs into the harness at first but managed after a couple of attempts. Looking down to pull up the legs I realised that there was a piece of bubble wrap hanging out of the harness. I'd not realised that it was in there. It was a piece of packing that I'd used when storing the Wasp. I knew what was coming next....WHACK.

It suddenly got sucked out and into the prop. It got churned up in about half a second and I was relieved to hear that there was no change in the tone of the prop. No damage then. Lucky ! I'll be more careful about checking inside the harness in future.

I flew over to where Graeme was circling and we heading south to the beach, climbing all the time. By the time we got over the coastline we were about 1500 ft above it. There was a gentle SW breeze which slowed our progress as we headed west along the coast. We flew on over the Palace Pier, the burnt out shell of the West Pier and made a turn just over the King Alfred Leisure Centre at Hove. The return flight was a lot quicker due to the tail wind and we quickly arrived back over Brighton Marina. I headed over Roedean school to take a photo and turned north and flew up to Moulsecombe and then SE to Woodingdean.

The sun was just about on the horizon now so it was time to land.

A nice flight. Short but sweet.

GLIDER: AIRWAVE K4
POWER UNIT: WASP
DISTANCE FLOWN: 15 MILES
FUEL USED: 1.5 LITRES

Here are some of the in-flight photos. Click them to enlarge.

CLICK TO ENLARGE THE PICS