Forecasts have been a bit all over the place recently and difficult to predict the good days. Funny though, I always think a good day may turn out less good, but never consider the reverse that a bad day might be much less bad and even good.Yesterday at Singlie we got the latter, and were rewarded with over an hour of surprisingly lifty conditions that let us have a right good explore of this new (for us) site.
XCWeather had strong gusts and showers for the morning and early afternoon so Stephen, Alex and myself met at 3pm at Singlie parking space. It is called Singlie cos that is how you have to park! The space is tiny but somehow we managed to get two cars and a camper van tucked in - and then spent twenty minutes sat in car for a passing shower. The sky upwind was not very promising at all, big dark cloud formations and rain curtains, but we could see a hint of blue in the background. Sure enough, the cloud passed, the day switched on and we walked up. Small hill = small walk up so things were starting to look up.
Alex was first off, and we followed soon after. None of us had flown here before but soon found good lift in front/above take off and used that height to wander along the ridge where it was easy to connect to more pockets of lift. This was such a treat - new site and defined regular lift areas that let you push out/across/up in any direction, always knowing there was a top up point not far away. Some of the thermals had pretty sharp edges and needed a bit of care, apart from that you could pretty much go anywhere you wanted. We even got right out well over the road several times without much effort.
Just as it suddenly switched on, the next big black cloud switched it all off again and we top landed. Waited a while for it to pick up again, but that was getting greedy, so forward launched for a pleasant fly down and easy landing.
This site really impressed me. Just a wee hill but some big flying and plenty landing options. Definitely one to try again.
