It’s the afternoon of Friday 27th May and my grown-up daughter and some of her friends are taking over our house in Bath for the weekend, so Lisa and I have found ourselves temporarily homeless! Well, not that homeless fortunately as Lisa’s driving down to Ringstead (near Weymouth) in our campervan, and I’m making my way to Leckhampton Hill (near Cheltenham) by foot and train with my volbiv gear. We both arrive at our respective destinations at about 1930 and post the obligatory sunset photos on our family Telegram group – my son replies dryly “spending some time apart are we?” Not too long ap ..read more

After weeks of forecasts featuring good thermals but with towering Cu and Cb, the forecast for Friday 7th May was looking much better with normal sized Cu for once! Whilst the BPRA skygods headed to the Elan Valley to chase big distances, most of us mere mortals headed to Worcester Beacon at the northern end of the Malvern Hills where big distances are still possible, just not as big as from further west. Thinking reasonably big, I’d set a goal 180kms away at Ely, perfect for an easy retrieve by train back home to Bath…  I took off at 1116 but with the combination of busy skies and ..read more

Mike Jardine invited me to do a talk about my volbiv adventures for 24th February LLSC Club “Meeting” – well thanks to Covid and Zoom I didn’t have to travel up to Scotland (more’s the pity), so here it is… sit back and get inspired! All the links mentioned in the talk are in the accompanying show notes below… LLSC Volbiv presentation (notes version)Download ..read more

I’ve been using Flyskyhy as my primary flight instrument since 2013, and my only flight instrument (along with various XCTracers) since 2015, and it keeps on getting better… Five years have passed since I did my previous video walkthrough, so here’s the recording from the Zoom demo I did yesterday evening as part of the Avon HG & PG Club’s Lockdown Lecture series. I probably forgot one or two things so please leave any questions in the comments ..read more

Having had an amazing volbiv adventure with four friends in July 2019, flying from Saint André-les-Alpes in the south of France to Andermatt in Switzerland, I was keen to encourage more pilots to give volbiv a go in a supportive group environment, and so the idea of the Gumball Transalps Rally was hatched. It wasn’t going to be a race, and people could do it however they wanted – purist (ie. no hitch-hiking or chairlifts), or more relaxed (me!) – but the intention would be to try to stick together, at least for the first couple of days. We’d cover the same ground as last year – St André north ..read more

Here’s a recording of my Zoom talk on which I presented on 26th November. You can download a pdf version of the notes from the link below: xc-planning-avonsew-2020-12-for-pdfDownload ..read more