I have been waking at about 4am to check the met and make sure our decisions are based on up to-date-information. There was an an enormous number of blue and orange blobs on the predicted rain 'radar' picture, but there were signs that the trend was in the right direction to the south.
We were all up at 6, and agreed the plan. Gina and I then headed off to find a local electrical motor engineer. I had noticed a loose wire where one of the control wires from the hand-held engine control was connected (or supposed to be connected) to the engine, and was fairly sure that was the problem - but I wanted to be sure. A very helpful engineer fitted a new crimped connecter in about 15 minutes, and charged nothing. He was a friendly weather-beaten guy whose main interest in his workshop on the edge of a quarry seemed to be motor bikes. On the way back, Gina and I located a good field for takeoff nearby [the grass in the Little Newsham field being too long]. We couldn't find the owner of the 'candidate field', but there were no animals nearby and no crops in the field; we left a thank you note and a bottle of wine at his house.
By about 10 we were back at the new field. I made rather a faf of the launch, but was soon enough airborne, and heading south with a 10 -15 mph following wind across the Tees for the rising slopes of the moor. I had intended to go SE of the Richmond military airspace, squeezing between this and airspace to the east. On this particular day the gap was blocked by NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) for an equestrian event. Instead I went west of EGD408 over the moor and then to the even narrower gap between EGD442 and the military airspace to the east. It gave me a wonderful flight over both moor and rolling rural landscape. Well to the south-east, I flew past Studley Royal Park (a UNESCO world heritage site) whose huge landscaped gardens and fine buildings are something to behold from the air. Soon after I came across Markenfield Hall, a magnificent early C14th moated manor. By now I was once again in bouncy air; I got a photo from a distance, but it doesn't give the sense of the timeless antiquity of Markenfield; I failed entirely to capture Studley: too busy flying and reacting to up and down drafts and side-swipes.
I landed in a field to the immediate northwest. It was perhaps not the best choice: full of cow pats. The owners of the pats were far away at the other end of the field; however an alien arrival from the air was DEFINTELY the most exciting thing that had happened to them all year; they came galloping over, surrounding me at close quarters. I had an interesting tactical challenge to get out of my harness, and prevent them trampling on my wing and eating the harness of my machine, while getting all the bits over a gate where they congregated observing us having our sandwiches. Charlotte and Gina had rv'd within a couple of minutes of my arrival on the basis of my real-time What's App tracking. But lesson - avoid fields with cows, present or recent.
