A very difficult day to know where to go and a last minute decision was made by Ben Friedland and I to go winching.

I climbed out on my second tow in a lovely smooth thermal and flew across to where Ben had topped his climb. We then minced around over the A40 under the only sunny patch of ground we could see, for what must have been as least 30 minutes, just waiting for the sky to improve. Once it started to look better we headed south and got a climb over a pig farm, base being just over 3000', which took us to Cirencester. Ben was very low when I spotted a flock of gulls rising to our west. After 2 ½ hours we had only covered 35k and were making slow passage towards Lyneham finding weak climbs along the way. Lyneham gave us less lift than we had hoped but Ben went scouting out over Chippenham and we were both up again, still not getting a lot of height in the very weak lift, spending most of our time at 3-3500' with very little drift too.

The sky was now looking better but it was still a matter of being very patient and working the weak climbs. Leaving Chippenham we headed for Melksham, still following the clouds, and got our first good strong climb from a fire to the west with base now over 4000'. We were now at about 60k after nearly 4 hours but if we could just stay up we thought we may make 100k. We were doing a lot of meandering following the clouds and avoiding the blue hole to the west of Warminster. A good climb under a big cloud with a sailplane up to a base of now over 5000' was enough to confirm the 100k. So we pushed due south with the day now dying to eke out what we could and coming in to land together. We then got a sweet retrieve with the first car that came along who took us to Gillingham Station.

It was a hard day when a lot of patience was required, helped enormously by the fact that there were two of us. Thanks Ben, what a fun flight!