So there I was, at Lords Seat lower take off one crispy cold morning in early March with about 90 minutes flying time on my new canopy and harness. The wind was off to the west but another canopy had flown up towards the upper take off and top landed. Off I went towards the upper take off using smooth lift off the sunlit slope. As I arrived in front of the upper take off I decided that as the wind was well off to the west I would try and fly over the corner to the slope which faces Dale Head which should have had the wind directly on it. As I neared the corner and the steeper slope which was in shadow I suddenly flew into fairly bad sink. I quickly turned and fled back towards the shallower slopes but was about a third of the way down the hill before the lift started to pick up again.

Then things began to get interesting. I was about 15 feet from the slope starting to work the light lift when suddenly I was hurled upwards about fifty feet. My experience of such small powerful thermals is that if they start suddenly they tend to also stop suddenly, and are accompanied by similarly powerful sink and local turbulence. I was not disappointed. A few seconds later I was dropping like a stone and the leading edge had rolled under along most of the left side of the wing. The violence of the thermal had all but eliminated my airspeed so corrective action had to be limited to one very short pull on the left brake which, thankfully, restored the wing. I knew I wasn't very high and the grassy slope is fairly benign so I looked down to prepare to PLF. This was when I noticed that despite all the acreage of hillside I could have safely dropped onto I had chosen the bit with the fence. Rapid manoeuvering to avoid the fence was precluded by my lack of airspeed, but fortunately the canopy started to fly just in time to carry me clear of the fence and away from the hill.

What did I do wrong? What didn't I do wrong! I was on an unfamiliar canopy and harness not having seen a decent thermal for five months. I had also taken off in classically dodgy spring conditions with the wind well off the slope and then flown over a dark gully with insufficient height.

Actually the few things I did right probably helped to avert disaster. I was flying a canopy of with a known good stability characteristic. I was flying with good airspeed so when trouble started the wing was not immediately fully stalled. (It was probably partly stalled at some point.) I minimised corrective action to stop the left wing tucking and avoided turning sharply until the airspeed had recovered.

The moral of the story is: BE CAREFUL!