Saturday 2nd March 2003
First flights of the year again (same date as last year if I recall correctly), and what a stonker it was! A good Combe Gibbet day lightish winds and nice and sunny, what more can you ask. Anyway, I was boating around on the hill getting myself back into the swing of things. I found myself in a nice little thermal decided to get a little height out of it. Anyway for once I didn’t fall out of it straight away and got myself up to about 1900ft ATO. During my climb I noticed I was drifting away from the hill and I realised that I would struggle to make it back to the hill if I lost the thermal. Reluctant to leave the lift I made the decision to stay with it. I did lose the lift not too long afterwards and started off on my glide. I got some areas of nil lift and a couple of little blips, but nothing that I could stay up in. I took an easterly course and spectacularly failed to find anymore lift and landed close to a village called Ashmansworth after a distance of 7.9km. What the heck, it was my first ever cross country flight and though it wasn’t an epic I was as excited as a schoolboy. Alas I didn’t have my camera at hand to record my achievement (apart from a shot of the landing field). This was all followed by a sobering 2+ hour walk back, across country to Combe, where I decided that the conditions didn’t make it worth attempting another flight.