I met Nick at Manmoel at around 12:45, it was a cloudy day with sunny intervals and a very chilly wind blowing in from the east. I walked the 200 metres or so from the car to the slope edge where Nick was already in the air with his SAS Mamba and I measured the wind speed at 18 - 22 mph, but it was north westerly and Manmoel is definitely an easterly slope. At least it was flyable, it just meant that our models would be a bit slow when traversing from right to left.
We were joined by David who had brought a couple of models with him just as the wind began to change direction to a full blown easterly, and the lift was fantastic as Nick and I raced each other along the slope, he with his M60 and me with my Ballistik, I think I had a slight edge speed wise 😉
Nick walked back to his car to fetch his 3 metre B4 and I assembled my Valenta models L213 A. This would be the first time I've flown this since last autumn so I was a little nervous about it being chucked off the slope. I needn't have worried though as it flew away nicely, in fact it was absolutely rocking in that superb lift.
I made two passes to gauge the landing zone and then came in for an attempt at landing. The crow and spoilers slowed the speeding model down nicely, in fact so much so that with it still about 4 metres above the ground I closed crow and spoilers and landed sweetly without them. Nice 😌
We were joined by another couple of guys but shortly afterwards the wind just died off and we were reduced to flying our light foamie models and scratch around a bit for lift. It was strange how the wind and lift varied so much in the space of four hours.
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