Your first "I learned something from that" story?

[Olympia463]

Other foul-ups

This is not a tale of potential disaster, far from it, but it made me realise that gliding was always going to be full of opportunities worth seizing :

Warm Saturday afternoon in August 1966 at Meir (Near Stoke on Trent) home of the Staffordshire Gliding Club. I arrived at the club and rigged my Oly 2B with the intention of checking out a new electric variometer - state of the art in those days. I took off by winch at around 2pm. Conditions were not all that promising I thought we were having an inversion and the thermals if any were very blue. However I did find some lift and proceeded to check out the new vario, gaining several thousand feet without really noticing in the process. The cloudbase was quite high so I felt a visit to it was in order and by the time I got there I was airborne for 2hr 30 mins beating my previous best endurance. I was also at 4500ft (not high enough to claim Silver height. I realised that a longer flight was possible as conditions were now excellent - lots of lovely Cu. I motored on and when I reached 4hrs it dawned on me that Silver endurance (5hrs) was possibly on. However I was scantily clad, and getting cold, and had brought no water and was getting very thirsty. The lift began to die at this point but I managed to scratch away at 2000ft for what seemed like an age and the 5hrs came up. This was when I could not remember the exact time I had released the cable. So I carried on for a bit getting lower and lower, till eventually I had to give up and land. In actual fact I had done 5hr 10mins, confirmed by my barograph trace (should have mentioned I was checking a new one of those as well). Five hours at Meir had never been done before - like the four minute mile it was believed to be impossible. Most folk at our club went to the Mynd and cruised up and down the ridge to do it. Needless to say the dam burst and several other pilots managed it that year. I was in the dog house when I got home, as we were bidden to dinner that night with friends, at 7pm, and were now an hour late!!

It taught me that one should always be ready to be airborne for a longer time than one might expect, and thereafter I carried water and chocolate on good soaring days.