Saturday started off with some unexpected drizzle that was quite persistent with NNW winds. The new muffler for the winch was fitted by Georgia and Mark Tyler.
Derek and Georgia collected tyres from around the airfield. Alan and Mark cut the sidewalls off with electric jigsaws. The tyres will later be used to mark runways.
Robert and Jon appeared and spent a couple of hours of theory with Anthony whilst they waited for the weather to clear.
The weather duly started to clear after 1:00pm with the wind swinging to the NW. Flying operations kicked off at 2:00pm with both KRO and GZQ in operation. The wind continued to swing to the west throughout the afternoon with scattered showers on the horizon that never quite made it to the airfield. Broken, bumpy thermals were around which resulted in Jon and Anthony enjoying flight of the day with 29 minutes in GZQ. They fought their way to just over 3100 ft sharing the thermal with a pair of eagles. They also got height of the day on one of the early launches, with a launch to 2400ft indicated. By 3:30pm the thermals had all but dissipated.
Mark and Georgia left at 4:00pm which is about when the wave turned on. There was an obvious line of rotor cloud a few km west of the airfield. There was an even more obvious lenticular above it. If that didn’t grab your attention, the huge lenticular cloud some km behind the airfield was painfully obvious. Despite several attempts, no-one was able to make enough headway upwind off the winch launch to get ahead of the rotor.