We leave sheepwash late afternoon and route direct to home base at Old Sarum, Salisbury. A healthy tail wind has us touching down 100 minutes later at 6pm. Unloaded all the stuff from the aircraft, fetched fuel and gave the aircraft a good wash. Back home by 2030 with a nice bottle of Rose sat out in the garden in the Sun. Excellent. We saw most of the mainland apart from the very North East of Scotland and the very South West of England.

Thursday morning. Fog and mist, and we can almost touch the clouds. Great, what happened to the forecast which was great yesterday? Ah, a low over Ireland is now pushing into the High which has been sat over Southern England all week, and the converging air masses are over Cornwall. Yeah, cheers for that. Time for the pub! We sit around the pub drinking coffee and orange juice (not together!) with the odd look at the new forecast and phone call to various places.

Our ETA is sometime around 2030, and as Andy has the faster machine we agree that he’ll go for it, dump his aircraft and gear and get to the pub and order food before they stop serving. We’ve got about 100MPH over the ground with a fast cruise and actually get there only 8 minutes after Andy. We park up with the owner watching and go over to say ‘hello’. A very nice chap too, though he is a little bemused that in the 30 seconds is took him to walk from the house, there was an aircraft there and nobody around!

We get into Compton Abbas about 1700. The plan is to carry on down into Cornwall tonight to Lands End airfield where we’ll stay the night, ready for a 22 mile hop across the sea to the Scilly Isle. And this is where things start coming apart. It will be a good couple of hours from here to Lands End and as usual we ring our destination to check there is nothing unusual going on.

Here we are still following the south coast travelling West. Just abeam Portsmouth and you can see the Spinnaker Tower - quite a landmark. IMAG0186.jpg #1080

Routed along the South Coast, and passed Shoreham airfield where I learnt to fly a long time ago. It was quite an exciting place to learn to fly microlights as it had full Air Traffic Control which certainly keeps you busy. Our destination is going to be Compton Abbas over in Dorset - a lovely field on top of a hill. IMAG0184.jpg #1079

Had a good noss at the Chunnel and met up over Beachy Head, where Andy in a Eurostar formated on me as agreed before, with James as temporary passenger. Flying in even loose formation requires a certain amount of trust between parties. Andy formated on me which means he was pretty busy keeping station, leaving the actual course to me. As they say, if flying in formation properly, if the leader hits something, so does everybody else!

Had a good noss at the Chunnel and met up over Beachy Head, where Andy in a Eurostar formated on me as agreed before, with James as temporary passenger. Flying in even loose formation requires a certain amount of trust between parties. Andy formated on me which means he was pretty busy keeping station, leaving the actual course to me. As they say, if flying in formation properly, if the leader hits something, so does everybody else!

We made a fairly early get-away from Clipgate and went to Headcorn for breakfast. Sometimes, there is nothing better than a full fry-up,, and this was just the ticket. We fed the aircraft also with some nice 100 octane fuel and had a good look around for a few hours. We decided to route down to the south coast via the channel tunnel entrance and have a good noss. #1076

Now, that was an interesting approach and landing. Clipgate is surrounded by a mass of tall trees which certainly focuses the mind. We were met by the owner Bob, who let us use a static caravan for the night, then ran us all over the place looking for a pub still doing food, the time now being getting on for 9pm. We failed so ended up with crisps and nuts to give the beer something to wash down.