I came, I soar, I went.

We're lucky to have a modern, high performance club fleet at the YGC - and those of us not yet fortunate enough to have our own glider, or a share in one are spoilt with a choice of either Discus or  DG-303 to go and have an adventure in. As you would correctly imagine, this system doesn't work so well on the good days. I arrived on the airfield at 8:30am intending claim the Discus for later in the day. Normally, nobody is around at that time - but this was going to be a good day (we have a had a few quite recently). To my shock, the hangar doors were already open (and thus, so was the flying list) and to my disappointment, both aircraft had been claimed for cross countries - even the Astir had names next to it.  With one two-seater out of action due to a split tail wheel, and another away at a competition, the very idea of taking the DG-500 and flying it solo was also a non-starter. What to do on a fine Saturday then. Wait in the clubhouse to see whether any o...

Thanks to some Yorkshire wave and a stroke of complete luck with regards to take off time and release point, I smashed Silver height earlier in the year without really having set out to do so, and so my journey to completing my Silver badge in 2018 officially began. (In case you feel that was cheating, I have now also completed a 4000' climb in thermals, we seem to be experiencing a strong summer of high cloud bases, when there are actually clouds!)  Duration came next, and as I explained before - I made it difficult for myself but managed to hang on to a deteriorating ridge just long enough. All that remained was the distance claim - and frankly, this was the one I was most  looking forward to. After over 100 hours of local soaring, I wanted to go and explore - but let's not get ahead of ourselves, I wanted to do it on a day that was sensible. When I first started researching things - Market Weighton seemed like the task to do; 51km away and an option to land at ...