Nearly seven years of friendship & flying fun

Hi all and a happy Easter to you. I hope you are all staying safe and well in these uncertain times.

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Steve and I have the A470 Soaring blog and I'm from SE Wales where we have some of the finest sloping in this fair land. Well that's what I believe anyway, and I believe Paul Hampshire believes this too as he makes the trip to my neck of the woods quite regularly and brings a model or two with him.

Paul and I first met in October 2013 when he and a friend came to S Wales to fly at the area known as 'The Bwlch', (Bwlch in English means gap and is pronounced Bulk), which is situated between the valleys villages of Nant-Y-Moel and Treorci and consists of seven slopes which all have names and face all points of the compass, so there is always a slope to fly whatever wind direction.

Paul turned up in the morning and I met him on the Ice Cream slope which faces north westerly and we had a light breeze blowing into our faces. The sun was shining and it wasn't cold so it was looking like being a nice day. However, that light breeze was to set the scene for many further visits by Paul because it seemed that whenever he did plan a trip, the wind Gods would not be in our favour and we'd be cursed with having to scratch around for lift as you can see from this first video of our first flying session together. After lunch the wind had shifted direction, as the forecast had predicted and we had to move to the westerly facing slope called Mickeys.

Then in March 2015 I visited W Sussex for the first time and Paul took me to several slopes over the two days. Everyone there was really friendly and we all had a good time.

In the summer of 2016 Paul brought his family to S Wales for their holiday staying in a cottage at Rhossili, which was where he fell in love with what is most probably the best flying slope in the whole of the UK. This slope develops so much compression lift it's unbelievable. On this first trip we began with a light breeze of around 10 mph, but by the time Paul had to leave to rejoin his family I was chucking my models around in 30 mph.

The following August 2017 Paul was back at Rhossili and this time the wind Gods were truly with us and we measured wind speeds of 50 mph in the compression zone which made for some truly awesome flying. Apart from the usual glass models we had a great time racing man on man EPP60 models, Paul with his NCFM M60 and me with my Polecat made by Rocket Ron Broughton. I won of course lol 😂

  August 2018 and Paul and I headed off to the Bwlch for a flying session. The light breeze was coming from the north and so we flew from the VR98 slope for a hour or so before deciding to move on and take Paul to a slope I'd been keeping a secret and is probably my favourite north facing slope in S Wales at Hirwaun. When we got to Hirwaun we found that the wind here was north westerly. Not that this mattered as Hirwaun has a NW facing slope also and Paul absolutely loved this slope with its smooth air, long grassy landing zone and spectacular views of the Brecon Beacons.

 Our final flying session together was in April 2019 when once again Paul brought very light winds with him. We were at the Bwlch and began flying on the NW facing Wrecker slope before the wind direction changed to S/SE and a short walk over the hill brow to Back of Wrecker was needed.

So here we are, one year on. The weather took a turn for the worse from October 2019 and it seemed that if the weekends weren't raining, then we only had light winds of 5-6 mph and consequently I didn't get any flying in leading up to Christmas. The New Year was no better and in fact we had huge storms with flooding that actually washed away part of the road that passes through the Bwlch and had to be repaired. This also happened on another slope I fly regularly at Meio Common, just north of Cardiff. Fortunately there is another road that leads to this slope as my usual road hasn't yet been repaired and is too dangerous to attempt without a 4 x 4 vehicle. So I've only had two flying sessions this year, the first on Meio where we tried to fly between rain showers and the second which was just the weekend before lockdown occurred, and although Paul wasn't here for this session I'll include the video here for you to see as this is another slope we have access to and faces easterly at Manmoel Common, which overlooks Festival Park at Ebbw Vale.

So I hope you've enjoyed reading this and watching the videos, and I hope we are out of lockdown soon so that we can get back to some sense of normality and be able to get some flying in. My son lives in Cornwall and I'd like to do a camping trip down there, do some flying along the coastal cliffs at St Agnes and do a spot of fishing also. I'd also like to get away to W Sussex for some flying with Paul but we shall have to wait and see what happens with lockdown as there may not be enough time left of this year to cram everything in.

Stay safe guys and enjoy your flying once you can get back to the slopes again.