Consolation prize

Luckily I’d kept one of the old tubes from when I fitted the new tyres in the Summer otherwise I’d have been stymied today and have had to wait until I could get hold of a new replacement. As it was, I was able to repair the wheel this morning and with the weather forecast being for broken skies I was off to Linton as soon as I could get away.

Today I was the only one around and after I’d opened up, braved the mud and got MYRO ready to go, I was all set for the off. By that time the forecast broken skies had become solid, murky, low, grey cloud but I was determined to get some time in the air today. I’d planned a flight over the River Thames into Essex again but I decided that with today’s weather conditions, that would have to be for another day. I set the camcorder up and yet again it came unstuck from its vacuum mount twice before I’d even started the engine. I noticed that somehow the connecting jack plug had become bent since I last used the camcorder but it seemed to be OK when I connected the lead up with the comms system. I managed to get the camcorder mounted securely, started MYRO, got the camcorder going and set off.

I headed north along my planned route but decided that in view of the low cloud and murk, I’d head up to the east of Gillingham and Rochester over the Medway estuary to the Isle of Grain and than head back via the north and west of Rochester to link up with the final return leg of my originally planned route back to Linton. Looking west from the north of Rochester the murk and gloom was very bad and for a while I thought that the perhaps the cloud base was lower than I’d originally thought. In fact it was not too bad along my planned route so I continued as planned back to Linton, which was by now in a sunny break in the cloud. After a few minutes flying locally to the north-east of the field I decided that it was time to rejoin and land. Afterwards I checked the camcorder and found that the recording was hopeless – the camcorder was aimed too high and because the auto-focus system had nothing to centre on, even when the ground came into view it was totally blurred. Also, presumably because of the problem with the jack plug, there was no sound, so I’ll have to try to resolve that before next time.

So nothing to show for the flight by way of a recording but at least I’d had the consolation prize of an hour and fifteen minutes flying, so I was grateful just to go away with that, really.