The worst of gliding....
Get to the airfield just as it starts to rain, to find that you are number 27 on the flying list, and they're short of instructors! Hang around for a long time intermittently getting very cold when you do nothing, or very hot when you're pushing a glider from one end of the field to the other. Get shouted at by someone officious when you were only trying to help!
Finally you fly. 800 foot winch launch.... there's no lift around, and you're back on the ground in 3 minutes. Have a 2nd launch, and cable breaks and you glider ends up at the far end of the field. By the time you've pushed it back, the sun has come out and everyone after you on the flying list gets a long soaring flight!
The best of gliding....
It's absolutely the most magical passtime, and knocks spots off powered flying for satisfaction!
At Sutton Bank in 198? I had my first flight in wave lift. It was winter, and we had a winch launch to about 400ft, then soared above the ridge until we reached cloudbase. We turned into wind, and flew just below cloudbase (and very bumpy it was....) for a few minutes. It then turned extremely turbulent for a while, before suddenly becoming totally calm as we came into the wave.
We were climbing at about 1000ft/min (10kts in glider speak), in front of a cliff-face of cloud. We beat up and down in front of the cloud, which was so sharply defined that you could just dip a wingtip into it.
At about 8000ft we arrived at the top of the "cliff-face". We could cruise at 110kts skimming the top of the cloud without losing any height, in brilliant sunshine chasing the shadow of our glider!
The lift was so strong that we flew aerobatics for 15 mins without losing any height. Those who had oxygen flew to well over 20000ft that day!
Anyway - enough reminiscing. Go try it! When it's good, it's fantastic. When it's bad, it's very British!
(One small tip, which I'm sure you already have heard - you will need a LOT OF RUDDER when rolling into and out of turns! And you need to keep nicely balanced once you're turning; if you find some thermals you'll be doing 30-40 degree banked turns just a few knots above the stall, sometimes in close proximity to other gliders, and it only takes a bit of mis-use of the rudder combined with a gust to make you realise why glider pilots practice a lot of incipient spin recoveries!
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