The Cloud Rally 2024 – Cutting the Last Umbilical
By far the most important date in my diary is the Cloud Rally – the highlight of my gliding pastime. There are many reasons for this – it’s fun for pilots of any experience (you don’t even need to be solo to participate in cross-country racing in a two-seater with an instructor), it is a steep learning curve, it allows you to land out completely worry-free and the clubhouse vibe is a buzzing blend of camaraderie, banter, mutual support and just plain fun. If you’ve not yet been involved in a cloud rally – please do so!
I’ve enjoyed many cloud rallies over recent years, but this year was the first time I made the podium. Not that I ever cared about making the podium before, of course. Until I made the podium. I’d flown at over 4000ft that day, but the view from the podium over so many encouraging bald patches was the highest I felt all day. However, this euphoria was not because I’d got further round the task than others I consider to be sky gods, or that I really needed a free bottle of wine; it was because I intentionally took a counterintuitive plunge to achieve it, and it paid off.
It has taken me 57 years to finally realise that I’m a slow learner, so bear with my stating of the bleeding obvious here, but it seems you can actually get around a task faster by flying in a straight line rather than flying in circles. I know – mind blown!
Several years ago, Andy Beatty preached the stoner mantra of “get high, stay high” to me and this got me all three parts of my silver. The concept of sacrificing height for speed was for “later”. Hence, I’ve flown every cloud rally clinging to cloudbase like it was the only thing holding me up in the air. I’d leave a thermal at cloudbase only to aim straight for the nearest cloud to top up the couple of hundred feet I’d lose getting there. The next cloud was not necessarily where I needed to be going, it would probably offer only a couple of knots up on one side and a couple of knots down on the other, and I’d likely drift backwards during the attempted climb anyway. Flying like this was a high workload, I got airsick, and the stationary sight of Bourn airfield below me was both annoying and tempting. And all this time, the ghost of Andy Wan Kenobi is in the back seat of my single-seater, encouraging me to use the force to get high, stay high.
So this year, I used the safety net of support from the rest of the club members to decide now was that “later”. It was time to cut what I call the third umbilical chord; the first umbilical chord is to intentionally fly out of range of your instructor (i.e. go solo), the second is to intentionally fly out of range of the airfield (i.e. go cross country) and the third is to intentionally fly out of range of cloudbase.
The sky was working well that day, and I’d got to cloudbase and out on task easily enough from a 2500ft aerotow. After each climb, I turned onto track, stuck the stick forward, put on 70-80 knots, and determinedly ignored every puffy temptress either side of me, sticking to track until I was down to half cloudbase. Only then did I consider taking the next decent thermal. As I say, I’d got away from GRL easily from this height only half an hour earlier, so why wouldn’t I be able to do it again? I did get low occasionally (e.g. down to 1500ft), but my simple rule of working on whichever of the cloud or the ground is nearer paid off well.
It felt weird. It felt wrong. It felt fun! It may have been foolhardy (I’m sure most instructors are wincing as they read this), but the whole point of the cloud rally is to allow one to push these envelopes of comfort, with the safety net of two mates and a towbar eager to come and fill your trailer and empty your club account via the bar.
So the moral of this story is that learning is an endless journey, and each golden nugget of instruction is tailored to where you are along that journey; the lessons will change accordingly (and occasionally contradict earlier ones), but every one of them is a vital stepping stone to the next. You just need to recognise when you’re ready to jump onto that next stepping stone.
Jay Derrett
