Originally Posted by
Step Turn
John Farley has written that you pick the more near field, and make it, rather than pick the far one, and hope to make it.
However you can take this a little too far. Many moons ago I helped to retrieve someone who had "run out of height" and landed out a lonnnnng way from base in one of those places only accessible via 25 miles of twisty single track road. To digress, I have to say that one of the things that I learned from my brief stint at gliding was that there are FAR more places in the UK like that than I had ever imagined.
As we approached the chosen field, we noted that there were a lot of large flat fields all around, unencumbered by glider-eating features. Then we saw it: a small hill, with a small field going up it. No! Really? He'd rejected all the nice big fields with standing crops, and the nice big fields with low crops, all of which had nice low boundaries and a complete absence of power lines. Instead he'd gone for the tiny one one which went up the hill, with power lines on one side, telephone cables on another, tall trees on a third, an electric fence down the middle and, yes, you guessed it, sheep on one side of the fence and cows on the other. Said cows had by now cleaned the flies off the leading edge and were now busy licking the gel coat off. Glider and pilot were otherwise intact. So at least he'd "made the nearby field work".
The one advantage of this field was that the "road" (by now a glorified farm track) went down one side (hence the telephone poles) which meant that we could get the car an trailer to a mere 150 yards from the glider. No chance of getting into the field with the car, however: the glider was waaaay up in the top corner; the access into the field was too steep and muddy to contemplate driving the car in.
So we trudged across the field, carefully avoiding the large quantities of fresh cow pats. On arrival we noted that the glider hadn't dodged the cow pats quite so well, and the underside and rear were liberally spattered with particularly fresh cow pat contents.
Disassembly was achieved with the usual "ease", aided by liberal clouts on the wing taper pins and the usual yelps of pain. Then we had to carry the bits down to the trailer, only remembering which order things needed to go into the trailer AFTER we arrived with the second bit and realising that we needed to take out the first bit that we'd put in. Of course the cows were not helping at all, and by now the sheep were trying to get in on the act, so it really shouldn't have been a surprise when the hapless pilot slipped on a particularly warm, wet and fresh cow pat into a veritable pool of brown and smelly stuff whilst encumbered with the heavy end of the wing (I'm not stupid!) and simultaneously fending off a particularly inquisitive bovine.
At this point we consoled ourselves that, following the usual rules, (you land out: you provide the retrieve vehicle) it was HIS car that we'd dragged the trailer with, and so it was HIS seats that he was going to ... er ... foul up.
The drive back was uneventful, if silent, and was conducted with all windows open and fan on FULL ...
PBW