Cotswold Slopers
Give me the Bwlch or give me Death!
The PSS Bash at the Bwlch went off without a single hitch. There were, in fact,
lots of them.
Getting there was easy enough - our fleet of Audi A6 Estates met up at the M4
J36 services to head up the valley. Is the A6 estate the ultimate glider pilots
car? See later for the surprising results...
We drove up to Mickey's slope in beautiful sunshine, marvelling at the fact that
every other hill would be a better slope than anything round here. we drove up the rocky gravel track to the actual slope. This
is where we met the clag for the first time.. it's a peculiar misty cloud that
hangs around on top of Welsh hills whenever people want to use them for
anything.
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We waited around for an hour or two to see if it would clear - in one short
patch Eyeboy flew his F-18 briefly then successfully managed an almost vertical
landing just before the mist closed right down again.
Eventually we gave it up as a bad job and decided to head for a sea cliff a few
miles down the road. Turns out the mist had descended all the way down now - the
nice sunny hills we'd seen on the way up had all disappeared too :-(
Halfway to the coast Tired Tim suddenly pulled over - his front suspension had
snapped. The gravel track up and down from Mickey's Slope had been the last
straw. Him and son Ben stayed and waited for the RAC while the rest of us headed
for the coast.
When we finally arrived at the Southerndown slope there was a grassy sea cliff
with a decent breeze, good visibility (but low cloud) and enough lift to finally
fly some PSS toys.
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Eyeboy took the lead with his F-18 - just as a helicopter came past on a level
with us and about 500m out to sea. There was a cry of 'I've lost it' and his
gorgeous F18 plummeted into the side of the cliff with no radio response at all.
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He took it well, considering. He had lost confidence in his radio by then
though, so stood back and watched for the rest of the day. Since he owned more
than half of the PSS planes that were present, that was a bit of a loss - can't
blame him though.
So, what was left? I flew my Ripmax Spitfire again (it's remaiden after the
tip-stall rekitting at Selsley), Andrew Mawr flew his BD5J which went very well
considering the wings are only half as big as they look like they should be.
Clayton flew his Sloperacer 3-D glider, but it didn't seem to understand the
'up' dimension - just didn't want to lift for no apparent reason, and finished
the day with a very heavy landing.
Other PSS features were a nice EPP Corsair (complete with lifelike flapping
wings) and a super heavy ME109 which could only do two speeds - "way way
too fast", and "landed".
Mickey's Slope and the rest of the Bwlch looked like they would have been every
bit as good as promised - if only the weather had played ball. Standing on the
edge of Mickey's the clag was going vertically upwards - the brief F18 (and
BeeVo) flights we tried went straight up, so no problems there. It was just that
you lost sight of them in the mist after about 1.5 seconds...
We'll be back, for sure. Thanks to Clayton and all the other locals for sorting
out some local knowledge for us - without that, Tim would have walked up to
Mickey's and not killed his car, Andy would have come home with an intact F18
and we'd all have been home in time for tea.
But no hard feelings. It was a memorable day ;-)