Five weeks after completing the SP, all three of us went back for the really good bit of getting signed off as Club Pilots. This is the minimum rating you must have to be able to fly without the presence of an instructor at your flying site. However, the whole point of calling it Club Pilot is the fact that you should then continue your flying within a club environment so that there will always be another pilot around with more experience than you who can help you out and hopefully prevent you from taking off when you shouldn't.
Once again the weather was against us for some of the days we had booked off work. It was the first week in July and we had no expectation of days of rain. Well it didn't rain, but the wind was against us during the middle bit of the day, you know the bit that comes between the instructor turning up and then wanting to home again. Some days there was no wind whatsoever, which was perfect for the "day one-er's" doing the SP course. But we were in the big class now and had no intent of running like stink to alpine launch just for a 30 second flight to the bottom of a steep hill just to walk back up again. No, we just laid there in the midday sun catching some rays thinking of the people at work sweating it out in a laboratory. On other days, the middle bit was too windy for us, we found out why whilst learning all about meteorology, which again I won't delve into.
We eventually got in enough flights to convince the instructor that we can launch both alpine and reverse, can steer where we want to go and land within 10m of a designated point, which included landing back on top of the hill. The only problem now was to get the wind conditions just right for the 5 minute soaring flights that were required.
Every now and then the instructor would get into a harness and take off and soar around the hill with the greatest of "I could do that" sort of noises came from people slips, only to hear the return echo sounding something "its too bumpy for you lot, we will wait until the thermik activity dies down a bit and the air flow smoothes out". 20 minutes later the instructor comes down to the exact point he left the ground and says "ooh I enjoyed that, anyone got any water".
I was finally signed off as a Club Pilot and promptly legged it down to the White Cliffs with a Pilot rated chap who volunteered to keep his eye on me. There then followed 2 half hour flights in the smoothest lifty air I had yet come across. Its all to do with where the air comes from, in this case the sea. All the flying up to that point had been inland a little bit and the thermals were giving rise to turbulent air.
My wife and friend were signed off later that day. Then the weather broke, again. No more flying until the middle of August when my wife and I went to get a Tow endorsement on our flying logs.