The day was forecast to be the first proper flying day of 2022 but the wind was only about 3-5 mph. A very speculative launch towards some thermalling birds by James Chancellor saw him going up rather well so I joined him and off we went. Unbelievably this was the only useable thermal and everybody else on launch got nothing after this. It felt so amazingly good to be thermalling again after about 100 days since my last thermal flight - I was whooping away like crazy.
We decided to head west as the clouds looked a little better that way. We spent some time playing with a bonfire and flitting in and out of the clouds at about 3,000 feet.
There weren't too many reachable clouds around but I thought the convergence cloud hovering over the Kingston ridge looked a good bet so headed off on glide. James joined me after dithering a bit but he got too low over Kingston and had to land. I found some zeros and after fannying about a bit I finally got a reasonable climb under the convergence and headed off west trying to properly connect with it.
I didn't manage it and flew straight through my last good climb because I was busy being a tit by chatting with friends and taking photos.
Ah well, it was such great fun to be up in the clouds again.