Flight from Stoke to Plazac – Part 3

It had taken me longer than I thought it would to get away from Abbeville after sorting out the formalities and topping up MYRO’s tanks from my jerries. I’d had to unstrap everything that I’d packed on the right hand seat to get at them and then put it all back again when I’d finished. Initially I had poured fuel into the right hand tank and then waited for it to transfer into the second but when I had realised that this was going to take far too long, I had removed the cap from the second tank and poured fuel straight in while leaning in through the cabin door. That had done the trick and I was to repeat this each time I refuelled afterwards.

So as I was already running behind schedule, I needed to turn things around as fast as I could here at Le Gault. But as someone who I didn’t know had, after a phone call completely out of the blue from me, been kind enough to agree to get me some fuel and had, if they were still here at the strip, probably been hanging around waiting for me for something like three hours because of my delays, I couldn’t just grab the fuel and scoot off. I could see a silver VW Golf parked next to the hut at the southern end of the piste so someone was still there, thank goodness, and sure enough, after I’d landed in a bit of a skittish cross wind, as I back-tracked towards the hut a guy emerged wearing a beard and a broad smile. After I’d shut MYRO down and got out, we shook hands and he said he was amazed that I’d got in from up north at all in that vis. He didn’t speak much English but we managed OK with my French and we went into the hut and he made us a cup of coffee each (a small glass actually!) by boiling water in a small saucepan. It seems that small farm-type microlight strips are similar wherever they are!

We talked about the weather and he complained that he’d had no students because of it and had even lost a bit of aerial photographic business because of the murk. By now there was a bit of a blustery north-easterly wind blowing and the sky was blue with broken cloud when you looked straight up, but there was still a lot of horizontal haze over the surface of the land. We talked about where I was heading for and not surprisingly, as he was about 3 hours to the north, he wasn’t very familiar with the area. The time then came to make a move and we went into his small but very tidy dome-type hangar, that was by no means full but contained four or five fully rigged Tanarg and other Air Creation ‘pendulaires’. I had ended our previous phone conversation by only asking him to get me 20 litres of 95 octane fuel but in fact he had got 45, and after checking my tanks, I decided that I might as well take 40 and possibly not uplift any from Wanafly if my fuel plan worked out. In fact it didn’t, but I’ll come to that later on. I got out the oil that I’d brought with me, one of my jerries to do my fuel-oil mix in and my funnel to do the fuel transfer, and pretty soon we’d got MYRO tanked up again.

So then came the time for me to settle up and my friend produced a petrol receipt from which he’d manually deducted the cost of the 5 litres I hadn’t taken and which came to just over €66. I pulled €80 in notes out of my wallet which I gratefully offered to him for the fuel and the cost he’d incurred helping me out. He was visibly offended that I had offered him more than the amount he’d calculated. I then reduced it to €70 and insisted he took it to cover his own fuel expenses for driving to the garage and back to get me the fuel and he even turned that down until it was my turn to really insist that he did! This is absolutely typical in my experience of practically all of the French people that I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with – they couldn’t be more kind and generous and it’s one of the reasons why I’m going to be happy living among them.

So then we shook hands and I got into MYRO, fired up and was away. I did an immediate low climbing turn to the left and as I passed the hut, we waved to each other and I was gone. I still don’t know what his name was and I wonder if we’ll ever meet again?

As the vis had improved a bit, even though it was now a little more bumpy, the flight to Wanafly was pretty uneventful. I saw a couple of other aircraft flying close to one or two of the airfields shown close to my track on my satnav but that was about it. After leaving Le Gault I had to do a dog leg through a gap between the airfields at Chateaudun and Orleans Bricy to remain clear of their airspace and then I had a long straight leg down to the west of a small town called Le Blanc. Here’s a pic showing this leg of my route.

Le Blanc is a small town to the north of Wanafly. It has an airfield on its south-east side and I had therefore decided to skirt round to the west so I could remain clear of its area. As I flew past I watched a light aircraft flying in there and I found out later that Dave Lord takes students there for cross countries. After Le Blanc, I turned onto more or less a due southerly heading and was quite soon looking out for Wanafly’s runway. As before, I’d been there in both Google Earth and Google Street View (both brilliant tools!) so knew exactly what to expect, and when I spotted what looked like a runway on the right heading (12/30) just to the left of my track but just a bit ahead of my estimated arrival time, I knew it wasn’t the right place because of the positions and layout of its buildings. However, a few moments later, there was Wanafly slap bang dead on my nose. I called up on the frequency that Dave at Wanafly uses (123.55) as we’d agreed and he came back to me from a hand-held. It was a bit too broken for me to get the complete message but I knew anyway that I had to land on 12 even though there was a cross wind and even a slight tail wind component. So I descended overhead, did a fairly tight circuit avoiding neighbouring buildings and houses and landed on the runway, which is slightly up-hill in that direction. After back-tracking and taxying round to where Dave and a student from Calton Moor who was also named Dave were standing, I cut MYRO’s engine after a flight of about 2 hours 40 minutes (as I recall) from Le Gault and a total of 6 hours 40 minutes for the day flying from Stoke to Wanafly.

I then had the pleasure of enjoying the most incredible hospitality imaginable that Dave and Mandy provide at Wanafly for their students and holiday visitors. I found them to be such lovely people and just by being there, you automatically become a member of their family – along with their two big friendly dogs, the cats, the pigs and the chickens. Dave had told me beforehand that there might only be a bed in a caravan available for me but in the event I was taken up to a beautifully decorated bedroom with a lovely high ceiling and traditional exposed beams, in the attic of their converted farmhouse. After a most welcome beer and a chat about the day and my experiences, we were treated to a gorgeous meal that Mandy had prepared for us all. And as all day I’d only had the small coffee that my friend in Le Gault had given me and two small chunks of baguette with cheese in that I’d made before leaving home (and which had given me indigestion at 1500ft when I ate them between Abbeville and Le Gault) this and the red wine that Dave insisted I had with it (ahem.. 😐 ) went down a real treat, I can tell you. We then sat round talking and having a few more drinks until gone midnight and as I was then ready to crash out.

And I slept like a log, which was great as the day before I’d not got to bed until around 12.15am after finishing off all my preparations for the flight, before getting up at 5.45am to get across to Stoke.

The next morning I didn’t get up until gone 9.00 am, which is most unusual for me. Mandy showed me where everything I needed was and I was then able to enjoy a very relaxed breakfast. It was just as though I was starting a lovely holiday, but in fact I had the last leg of my flight still to do. The trouble was that although I only needed two hours or less to get down to my final destination in the Dordogne, although the weather was good enough for me to get away from Wanafly with a bit of a blustery north-easterly wind and some residual horizontal haze (so not good enough for poor Dave from Calton Moor to get up), down there it was stormy with rain and very low cloud while an occluded front was slowly passing through.

I knew all this, of course, because now that I was so close, Bob was keeping in touch regularly by phone from the Plazac area. And it became even more of a team effort when Dave checked the synoptic on his PC and told me that from the rate the front was moving, there would not be a weather window until later that afternoon when it would clear my destination before another much stronger cold front moved down quickly behind it from the north, probably arriving the next day. So there wasn’t much else I could do except ready MYRO for the flight and enjoy what Wanafly had to offer. What an awful fate…. 😉

— To be Concluded in Part 4 —