Shane's hill, I take it all back.

There were about ten other pilots and all got some fairly descent flying in.

I pulled up to find there was nowhere to park the car, the normal lay-by was full of vehicles, fortunately Colin   was just getting ready to climb the hill and offered to park closer into the verge to allow me to double park and block him in. It never fails to amaze me how thoughtful people can be.

The walk up was easy looking at first glance. A few feet into the field I encountered the first of the snow drifts, this will be fun I thought. Snow drifts soon lose their appeal when they vary up to four feet deep in patches nearly all the way up the hill. I particularly didn't like the way they had covered over the small streams that are I seem to remember being on the hill. I just followed in the footsteps of previous (hopefully successful) pilots.

When I got to the top I spent a moment talking to the other guys on the hill and got my breath back. I started up packing my kit and realised I had left my radio, vario (well car GPS with LK8000 on it) and camera in the car. I stood a while and considered the walk up and whether I really needed these items. Then I thought I could probably do with the exercise. I put my gear in a place where I thought it couldn't roll down the hill and fetched the other stuff.

I got airborne and started gaining height and was soon soaring up and down Shane's hill. I wanted to get across to the higher ridge to the north and thought I had gained enough height to make it across but only managed to land in a snow drift at the bottom of the higher ridge. After a few minutes wrestling with my lines from the heather walked to the top of the ridge and after a brief rest was able to launch and got a fair bit of height. After a while of running back and forward on the ridge losing then regaining height I decided that before the next drop in height I should head on back over to where I took off. I had a top landing that I was really quite pleased with. I more or less flew to where I wanted and put down just shy of the other pilots that were on the ground. This got an approving comment from my my former instructor, Bertie.

After a bit of a wander and a rest I set a flight plan to see how I get on and if I bomb out land by the car and go home. My successful flight plan took a lazy 5 minutes.