2011 really threw up some classic days, and although that year will always be associated in my memory with the tragedies of the Worlds and my own prang, there were many special days of memorable XC flights shared with friends.
Thanks to Nigel Page for reminding me of one of those magic days. Below is his tale. The Photo is of his maiden flight on the Mentor 2 on his way past Barco towards Tornavacas.

A Fine Day In Piedrahita

The year had not gone too well. Many things got in the way of flying and about mid June I hurt my back and could not fly at all for a while. At the start of August I found myself on my way to stay with Steve Ham and Puri in Piedrahita having flown only a handfull of hours in the previous six months and not at all for five weeks. Creeping old age was also making me less confident on my DHV 2 Sigma 7 as it had on my DHV 2/3 Omega 6 some years earlier. Some of the new DHV 1/2s fly extremely well and I had intended to try a Nova Mentor 2 but my bad back had postponed that. However, Steve had obtained one as a demo for me to try at Piedrahita which was to arrive around the middle of my holiday.

In consideration of my lack of recent air time I flew fairly carefully the first week on my Sigma 7. I did OK though. It’s always fun flying at Piedrahita with good groups of keen pilots and Steve’s excellent guiding and support. At the start of the second week a bag containing a something a lurid green colour was thrust in my hands and I was told to get on with it. I’m always a bit nervous on a new glider but taking off a 900m hill (take off at Piedrahita is at about 1900m and valley areas 1000m AMSL) on an unknown glider that had not been flown required extra care . Fortunately we were early at the take off that day and I was able check all the bits appeared to be tied on properly, the brakes set OK and that the thing would at least kite a bit. Compared to my Sigma 7 the Mentor seemed to almost launch itself but took a little getting used to in the air as the handling was very different. Two hours later I landed about thirty kilometres away near the Tournevecas pass without having scared myself too much. I’m not sure how much I might have scared the others but comments were more about how green the glider looked rather than how it flew. This glider was so green that with the sun behind it the screens on my instruments look green. I guess I must have looked green too! Anyway it seemed to fly OK and we had some good flying over the next few days. On the best day, of course, I managed to find some of the worst sink I’ve ever encountered low down and ended up on the ground early when the others flew all day. Never mind. I think I learnt something.

The following day we had the light north wind forecast to become northeast. On some days getting started from the Peña Negra take off can be a bit tricky. Unless a few people are in the air to show where the thermals are it can be a bit of a gamble where to try for the first climb. The hill at Piedrahita is a long ridge facing northwest with shallow spines running down it. The general technique early in the day is to stay over the spines and avoid the potentially sinky cloughs between them. If the particular spine you are on isn’t working you either cut across to another or follow the spine you are on towards the valley. It is important to stay high enough over the spines to be able to begin thermalling without having to worry about the terrain and to be able to deal with a bit of unexpected sink. Hill huggers tend to end up exploring the hillside on foot!

I turned right after launch and soon had a reasonable climb but with a surprisingly strong drift towards the east. OK as such, but a lot of drift for not much climb. It felt like the wrong place and I headed back towards the take off area. My next idea was to make for the usually reliable “chalet spine” to the left of take off where some pilots were doing better. I soon got a climb back to take off height and followed the spine down quite a long way before finding an excellent climb with only a little drift. At 3000m it felt good and lacking any other plan I flew along the ridge towards the “big spine” to the east. Meanwhile most of the group were scattered between the hill and the town in the valley. I arrived over the big spine to find no lift but pilots in the valley area were getting climbs so I left the hill and joined them. We worked bits and pieces and the group got up to a very respectable 3400m.

At this point Steve pointed out that we had been flying for an hour and had only gone about 3 km and that perhaps we should decide where to go. Easy for him to say! The rest of us were quite pleased just to be flying. Steve has spent a lot of time taking people over the Villatoro pass on the direct route to Avila and would quite have liked to try going north part of the way to Peñaranda and then east to Avila. It sounded good to me but the lure of the pass was too strong for some so Avila direct it was. After bobbing about under a cloud over the rather scenic village of Bonilla we set off towards the pass. With the height we had we didn’t have to bother with the technicalities normally associated with getting across the pass and just sort of made our way along the middle. Steve and a few of the others got on fairly quickly but the rest of us were a little behind having missed a climb. It was generally quite lifty enabling us to stay fairly high but the group scattered as we entered the Adaja valley. A few kilometres on a climb over Villatoro topped me up and I headed along the road towards Avila helped by the northwesterly wind to the next climb at Amavida. Things were looking messy ahead now and with Chris Little just behind me I headed diagonally across the valley for the sunlit ground on the south side. It seemed a good theory but we glided quite a long way without finding lift and our lack of height began to be a concern. Fortunately we found ourselves near the village of Baterna just to the south of the Adaja river which has a low scrubby hill to the north. This hill doesn’t look much but often seems to work and I have scraped out of there from low down on several occasions. Chris and I sort of felt our way across the hill into a fairly wide area of patchy but usable lift. We made a slow climb to about 2400m and set off towards the area just east of Muñogalindo known for producing convergence which had some fairly big clouds over it. Arriving at the edge of the convergent area we found a moderate thermal. It was a little lumpy and I began to get the feeling that there was a strong core somewhere. I explored a bit and found the thing which I guessed from the sound and nearby turbulence was going to be a bit wild. On my Sigma 7 I would have been rather cautious but I decided that it was time to find out what the Mentor could really do. Abandoning any pretence of finesse I pointed it where I thought the core was and when everything went whoosh I pulled the string and hung on. All fairly exciting and after a few hundred metres of rocket climbing it widened to a more relaxing climb. I reached about 2800m with Chris a bit lower having missed my rocket.

We headed northeast diagonally towards the main Avila road. In that part of the world the scale of things can seem immense. After gliding for what seemed ages we had flown nearly 10km without finding any lift and were getting rather low near the main road. With no other ideas I started looking for a safe landing and easy retrieve with the faint hope that the road would trigger something. Chris had to land and as I sized up a field for myself I noticed a bird circling very low just to the north of the road. I flew over to it but felt no lift so I flew a circle over the top of the bird. As I sank to about about 40m I began to feel some weak lift as the bird, possibly a sparrowhawk, gently climbed towards me and I concentrated on a fairly delicate climb. Usually I find that thermalling birds are very good for locating an area of lift but once in the thermal it’s best to do my own thing. This is partly, I suspect, because the presence of a paraglider in a thermal makes the bird want to leave. I thermalled as accurately as I could but still kept blundering out of the lift until I noticed my corrections always brought me back immediately behind the bird which was still thermalling despite my presence. I stopped trying to core the thermal myself, followed the bird, and was rewarded with an astonishingly accurate climb. Sharing thermals with birds are some of life’s greatest experiences but to be literally led up a thermal so cleanly by one was genuinely awsome. After a while my new friend said goodbye and left me to blissfully continue the climb on my own.

I talked to Steve on the radio. He was somewhere nearby and the others had all landed except one who had flown on to Avila. I was somewhere near the airfield at el Fresno and Avila would be an easy glide but Steve suggested we try and fly back to Piedrahita. As the strength of my thermal declined I set off back towards the convergence area near Muñogalindo. To my delight as I left the core I found I just kept climbing gently and had acquired a tailwind. Ten minutes or so later without turning I was 5km towards home and another 300m higher. Steve was a little way in front of me and we headed along the road back towards the Villatoro pass. I got a massive climb under the big clouds at Muñogalindo which I left way below cloudbase for fear of being sucked in. Steve missed that one but seemed OK and I waited for him to catch up under the next cloud a few kilometres on. The following glide got us to somewhere around Amavida about 8km short of the pass where I had found a climb on the way out but the cloud there was a bit messy and didn’t give us much. We plodded towards the pass finding some lift on the way but not getting really high. I was beginning to tire and a bit confused about how we were going to cross the pass. Thankfully Steve was still fully switched on and took us over a spine at the foot of the north facing slopes on the south side of the valley. The tactic soon became obvious to my somewhat fatigued brain in that it was getting fairly late and the sun had come around to shine fairly directly onto the north faces. As we arrived over the spine Steve was about 50 or 100m higher and disappeared skywards leaving me scratching around in zeros. I had some height so I tried the next spine along. That didn’t work but the area clearly had very good potential with a nice flat, sunlit field leading to the original spine which had been cooking all day and everywhere feeling lifty. As I gradually sank I felt my way around the field and managed to sustain at maybe two hundred feet for about ten minutes. It was baking. Something stronger had to come off and eventually a creepy little thermal wafted out of the field and tracked up the spine. Eventually the thermal widened out and I climbed nicely over the mountain in an 1800m climb to about 3000m and made another 300m in a straight line as I set off towards Piedrahita. Steve was well on his way by then in order to get back and organise the evening flight but suggested I flew along the middle of the valley as it might get a bit windy on the ridge. I had a nice lifty glide back topping up in the odd core here and there and arrived quite high over Piedrahita. A nice easy climb took me over the Peña Negra take off and a little beyond. I was very tired and took a gentle glide back over the town to land around quarter past six.

I had been been in the air for six hours and forty minutes and flown 100k as an out and return. I was particularly pleased to have flown for such a duration as prior to this flight I felt my limit was around four and a half hours. It has to be one of my best flights although I may well have not made it back over the pass without Steve’s help. The Mentor 2, which I later purchased, had enabled me to confidently deal with some of the wild stuff in the Adaja valley whilst retaining most of the performance of the gliders I had been used to in the past. I’ve grown to rather like fluorescent green! Piedrahita is a great place to fly. I should fly other areas more, but it’s great fun and the support Steve provides helps me to deal with a UV sensitivity problem I have. The more I fly in Piedrahita the more interesting it becomes and there is plenty more to do there.

© Nigel Page 2011

We are now taking bookings for next year and the available dates can be found in the calendar page. If you are interested in joining us next season hurry up and book now, as places are filling up quickly!

There are no changes from last year. The price is 480euros/week during the high season (June to the end of september) and 450 in april, may and late september- october.

The Easter week is flexible, and you can extend your holidays around that time, arriving earlier a few days or leaving after Easter monday if you wish. We will adjust the airport pick up to whenever the largest number of people arrive and leave.

I am writing this post while there is a howling wind and persistent rain outside. A very miserable autumn day indeed, which has made me think of the beautiful weather we enjoyed less than a month ago, when the ladies and gentleman of the Spanish experience week came to visit for a second time.

When the spanish class group from the Malverns (plus scottish Jean) asked me again this year whether I could organise another week for them in october I thought I wouldn’t find enough activities to keep them ocupied and topics to discuss. I was wrong. We managed to have another successful week full of spanish experiences.

This year Sylvia couldn’t make it and Jean Bull, a retired Malverns College teacher, took her space. The others were the same as last year: Pat, Mary, Liz, Neville, Gillian and Jean. They all came to practice their spanish once more and enjoy the local culture and landscape.

The first morning we did the usual introductory lesson and we practised common situations dialogues, both in formal and informal environments. I was determined to speak more spanish this year than I had done in their first visit, and I did try to stick to it at least during the morning lessons. We went for a walk in Barco the Avila in the afternoon, and had dinner at the family home in Zapata in the evening.

The following day I had a job interview in Avila in the morning,  so Steve took over the food lesson, and they all managed to do the shopping in the market rather efficiently. They bought all the ingredients for a feast which included a suckling pig which we seasoned and took to the local bakery to be roasted. The baker gave us a little talk about local sweets when we went to pick it up later that day. We had a very succesful dinner of Barco beans and Cochinillo, and by the end of the meal we were all very full indeed.

On wednesday we had a very intense lesson about spanish literature, and later went on a treasure hunt in the palace gardens, where we went looking for local tree species to show us the way.

The next day we travelled to the Sierra de Francia area to spend a couple of days exploring its villages and enjoying its beautiful landscape.We started with lunch in El Casarito, sitting outside enjoying the smells, the food and the company was for me the higlight of the week. That afternoon we went up to the top of Peña de Francia to see the monastery and the stunning views.  We spent the night in the picturesque village of La Alberca but did also walk around Mogarraz and medieval Miranda del Castañar the next day.We visited the crafts museum and an old vine cellar to know about all the ancient traditions, and did a fair bit of shopping too. To end the tour we had a olive oil tasting and a very intense chat about olive oil production. All of this was blessed with some fantastic weather, which allowed us to sit outside in a very relaxing mood.

For the last day we went to Salamanca to visit some of the places we didn’t have time to see last year , like the Casa de Lis museum and inside the Cathedral. We had lunch in the square and went for a walk in the old quarters afterwards but unfortunately the cathedral remained closed this time as well. Maybe a good excuse to come back again…We had dinner in our place for the last night and everybody, including me, was looking very tired.

We still had time to spend a few hours in Avila on the next day before heading to the airport for the flight back. A walk along the Avila walls for some and a last group lunch together. We took the scenic route to Madrid and visited the imperial village of El Escorial with its impresive Royal Palace. That day was so hot it felt like mid-summer…I expect it was a bit of a shock to arrive in wintery Britain well past nidnight.

I want to thank everybody in the group for being such good company, for your patience, for enduring my hiperactive moments, for all the laughs and all those blank faces looking at me from time to time. It is fantastic to see people that enjoy life so much as you do.

The summer anticyclone refuses to go away, so the flying weather just carries on (with my busted arm I was rather hoping it woud finish now). A local pilot got to 4090m this past weeked (Roberto). Daytime temps still in upper 20s.

Light winds and warm for our last week. Regular climbs to 2800m, flights to Barco and one near Avila(Andre).
It would be a great flying week this week too. Tough typing with one hand so signing out for a month or so. Bye

Flyable every dy except Saturday due to strong SE wind. Generally gentle climbs on PN, the sun angle being quite shallow. PB for Claudio earlier in week, and a run of 45km towards Salamana for Andre on Friday. Next week looking good with light Northerlies

After 9 days in hospital it was very nice to get home again. Thanks for all the support. The surgeon managed to get the hand screwed on palm inwards (thank´s Chris) and seemed a lot more competent than the last lot 20 years ago. My poor right arm has taken a bashing 4 times now (2X skateboard,1 X Hang glider and now my first PG injury).
Along with my old dinnerfork shaped Colleys fracture I now have a plated radius and ulna and only half a radial head. Still hurting plenty, not helped with numerous bumpy trips up Lastra and Chia this week.

How did it happen?. Foolish error of course. I decided to land in a field near my house (short walk, lazyness etc). The wind was unusual in that is was lightly from the mountain, whilst 2km away was on the hill in the town landing. Large Cu o the plateu had shut off conditons on the hill due to shadow, in the valley the appearance of sunshine was making it become too easy to stay up and some of the Cu was begginning to reach Congestus level. Smooth sink nr my house led me to believe I could handle the slightly more complex approach to the field than normal (The approach from this direction would not permit short landing options -buildings, fences, cables etc). Slight overcontrol on my left brake whilst turning to base leg caused a tip stall. I quickly sped up to recover but was now going fast towards the road and out of glide into my field and now boxed into the entrance drive of Falcon Crest with the option of hitting the entrance building or the cables around it. The glider was still occilating from the recovery so my full stall landing from approx 4m into the driveway was not as even as I hoped for, the right side stalling first and causing a slight right hand rotation causing my landing (impact plf) to have a small body rotation to the right. This rotation was nicely stopped by my right hand as it hit the concrete. Everything else OK but a floppy right arm, lots of pain and lots of blood (the Ulna made a slight exit behind my wrist).
One of my golden rules ignored!. Always go for the easiest landing option over the ease of the walk out.

After 9 days in hospital Steve came back yesterday ready to take over the guiding again and rather keen to be out and about. I want to thank all the guys and girls in the group last week (Nigel, Simone, Howard, Rupert, Paul, Kathryn, Bill, Liz and Anton) for being so understanding and such good fun . I had a fantastic time with them and I hope they enjoyed all the flying, which was quite a lot. Well done Liz for being the one that was always up there showing everybody how it could be done, and congratulations to Paul and Kath on the personal achievements as well.

Another fantastic looking sky but unfortunately too windy from the SW.

It was Simone and my son Oliver’s birthday today and they had lots of presents and birthday wishes. It was also Steve’s aniversary, as he had his mishap exactly one week ago. He will be leaving hospital on sunday.

With perfect cloudstreets everywhere, thursday looked like an amazing soaring day, but with the clouds leaving the valley in shade for long periods of time, the wind at take off couldn’t make up its mind and kept switching on and off. It was going to be one of those “glory or misery” days: amazing if you managed to reach the sunshine and catch a good climb but easy to end up on the ground in no time if you were unlucky enough to take off with the bad cycle. After a number of disappointing flights all week, it was time for Rupert to get lucky, and so he was. He climbed up to cloudbase at 3100m and flew a triangule around the valley, his PB for altitude and distance. Liz was the other hero of the day, reaching the clouds and flying out towards Salamanca. Very smooth and floaty evening flight along the ridge for everybody.