Week 6 - Day 7

Another frontal day, with rain, sleet and snow from a 200ft cloudbase throughout the morning. The weather began to clear up around 3pm with some sol getting to the ground, and some small and scraggy cumulus being formed off Stage 1. I think we perhaps left it slightly late launching, but were trying to see that the rotor and thermals being triggered by the ridge were repeatable and consistent. After 45 minutes of watching, a very large area of dead cumulus from a zone of much higher humidity was approaching and sat only two or three kilometres to the west. The climbs to start with were quite broken, but this was to be expected, and we moved further north along the ridge. Our options were beginning to thin fairly rapidly; the humid airmass had wiped out any thermal activity south of the Hecho valley and much of the activity within it and the better looking (rotor?) cumulus to the North would have had us arrive low to them with a very small chance of being able to scrape back to the airfield - a time when local knowledge would have helped considerably, as it may have been that we were guaranteed a climb from the clouds to the North, but it wasn't a risk worth taking on our last day. I made the very bad call to go and try some rotor looking activity on the north side of a cloud from the humid airmass, which on trying promptly delivered 10 knots down and rain straight to the ground. Not the perfect way to end the week, but better than not flying at all. Huge thanks to everyone at the airfield here, they've been a a massive help on days so marginal we wouldn't have even launched at home, and best of luck to the guys from Lasham that come after us. Hasta luego.