Mat's Paragliding Blog: Rushup Edge

I'd almost given up any thought of flying before the end of the year. Every weekend I'm free it seemed to either be howling a gale or pouring with rain. This week though an area of high pressure settled over the UK giving light southerlies so checking every forecast on the web I booked the day off work at the last minute and the following morning left home at 7am headed for Rushup.

I arrived about 10.30am surprised to find no-one in the air and only a few cars in the car park. It seemed highly flyable and so I made my way up on to the ridge. The wind was between 10 and 12mph and all seemed fine. I took off second go after a mild dragging on my first attempt (wing came up asymmetrically) and soared around for 5 minutes or so before being forced into a slope landing as I slowly lost height. The air was smooth enough but had areas of lift closely followed by sink. Kind of weird - it was smooth lift followed by very smooth sink - almost like sets of stairs in the air mass. I'd not flown in such un-predictable conditions before and they seemed especially strange as the wind on the hill was so consistent. Was this some mini wave effect I wondered. There were some wave-ish bars of cloud in the sky to the south west but I didn't think that would affect me below the top of the ridge.

Slogging back up the hill saw me disintegrating into a sweaty state of near collapse at several points before I got back to take-off. I sat down for half an hour to recover and to re-assess conditions. Why had I gone down when the wind was so consistent? It was a little bit off to the West but no more than when I was here in October.

A couple of other pilots arrived after a while - one a willing wind dummy so I got to wait and see if things had improved. They had! We all took off soon after and spent a very pleasant hour or so wafting around in the smooth, light conditions.

At the end of the day the sunlight broke through the clouds and illuminated the hillside and I followed Mat along the ridge and down to the landing field with a number of hill walkers photographing us as we flew past them. A great end to the day where the temperatures never got above 3^oC.