We had a fantastic day's flying from Bo Peep hill on Tuesday 7th June...
A Fantastic Day's Flying At Bo Peep!
By Carlo Borsattino, Flybubble Paragliding.
We had a fantastic day's flying from Bo Peep hill today, Tuesday 7th June, with quite a few paraglider and hang glider pilots managing some very interesting - and quite challenging - cross country flights, exploring the thermals and complex areas of lift around the surrounding South Downs hills, and some farther a-field!
Bo Peep is one of the main flying sites in the Southern Hang Gliding and Paragliding Club, situated on the South Downs hill range roughly half way between Brighton and Eastbourne. Like all Southern Club sites, it's not very high - only around 3-400ft top to bottom for the most part, and a fair bit lower than this in places. On the plus side, like most South Downs hills generally are, it's a nice friendly grassy rolling slope - although there is a small rocky quarry half way along the ridge, and some wooded areas near the bottom of the slope. For the most part, Bo Peep is a lovely soar-able ridge with a few nice medium-sized bowls, taking a roughly ENE - NNE wind, which (on a good day) is soar-able for around a 3.5km long stretch - although strangely (and somewhat sadly) most pilots seem to make use of only about 1km of this, for some very strange reason which completely escapes me!
On this day, the flying weather conditions were quite variable, with not really quite enough prevailing breeze to soar consistently - only occasional good thermic cycles which were very short and far between, in both the geographic and time sense of the phrase! I was one of the lucky ones who managed to connect with one of these thermal cycles and to get up to cloudbase, from where I decided to attempt to complete a triangle flight which I've been wanting to do for years...
