Dave Oldfield & myself went a field adjacent to St Jude(?)(arrived 1 ish) where Dave had some ground practice in the light breeze.
Meanwhile I had had a short sortie of about 10 min’s to test the air and found it nicely buoyant with workable thermals of around 100 to 200fpm with the occasional bonus of a tight 6up core. When Dave was ready to fly, the pull start on his machine malfunctioned and although we had the engine running it was decided that it would be prudent for David not to fly his machine. I then took off again and was about 2 Km upwind of the field and attempting to work a broken thermal when I accidentally switched off my motor, not having an in air re-start facility, (I’ve misplaced the necessary kit during the house move!) I was presented with the task of gliding back to the field from around 600 ft. for a restart. Fortunately the air was reasonably buoyant and I made it back with height to spare. After restarting I had a very pleasant session of around an hour thermalling between the wildlife park near Sulby and downwind of St Jude. The thermals were very workable and most of time was spent with the engine at tick over circling my way towards base which I would estimate was at around 2,700′ (I was leaving the thermals at around 2,400′ to avoid going into cloud). With the thermals I was finding I’m fairly sure that it was possible to thermal from the wild life park to Ramsey but didn’t venture to far down wind as I wasn’t sure about fuel to get back to the field, (missing another piece of kit, a mirror to see the fuel level!) and didn’t really want to land out when I don’t know my way around that well (What a whimp!). After flying in near zero temperatures for around an hour, a severe case of the shivers set in so I decided that lunch sounded like a good idea. So Dave didn’t fly, but had some valuable ground practice, we didn’t see Julian, and I had three fun flights totalling around 1 1/2 hours.
All in all, a good first session for me on the island.