FUSHIEBRIDGE
GOREBRIDGE
MIDLOTHIAN
EH23 4QG
Tel: 01875
820102
Email: gordon&jill@eosmicrolights.flyer.co.uk
16 May, 2002
Dear
Member
This
letter is prompted firstly by a new date for the Safety Evening which had to be
postponed from 6th March.
The new date is THURSDAY 30TH
MAY at 7.30 pm. We are going to the
George Hotel in Haddington, a white building at the east end of the High
Street. Parking should be no problem in
the High Street (fingers crossed).
There is a bar and they are not charging us anything for the room in the
hope that we spend lots at the bar!
The format of the evening will be as originally planned. The guys from Edinburgh Air Traffic Control will be doing a presentation, then Gordon and George will be going through East Fortune airfield procedures and Graeme Ritchie will be showing his great slides of his Bute trip. We’ll also be showing a few slides from the massive Plockton trip in 1997 in the hope of whetting your appetites for another trip.
If you can come to the Safety Evening, please can you let me know so I can get the numbers for the venue etc. Thanks.
Nothing
changes much around here, and a year has not past when I’ve managed to ask
members for their subscriptions ahead of time!
This year is no different but a few of you have been good enough to let
us have your subs already.
In
case you don’t know, your money goes towards paying rent (for the runways,
grass areas and where the clubhouse sits), electricity (a huge amount so please
turn off hangar lights when you are not in there), rates, water rates,
lawnmower maintenance and fuel, clubhouse equipment, radio licence, CAA
publications, and loads of other incidentals.
The
fee is not changing this year (£60 for Flying Members, £75 for Family Members
and £20 for Associate Members) but since we are actively looking for a new
clubhouse it might be that we need to come back to you all for a bit more if
something spectacular comes along.
For
your information:
Flying Membership is those people flying from
East Fortune or for those who wish to fly into East Fortune more than 10 times
per year
Family Membership is for partners who both
fly – the sub covers both people.
Associate Membership is for people based at
other airfields who wish to fly into East Fortune less than 10 times per year,
or who just wish to keep in touch with us.
Please
could you send your cheques made payable to ‘ESMTA’ to us at our home
address. Please don’t make them payable
to East of Scotland Microlights or Gordon Douglas. If you no longer wish to be a member, please could you drop us a
line to that effect.
Club News
Well it’s our very own George Kerr who’s in the news at the moment, in both the Births and the Marriages columns! He and Lucy are expecting another baby, due in November, and they have decided to get married in anticipation of the event. They get married in July, so good luck with the preparations, guys (Lucy …).
Richard
and Katriona Ferguson are expecting baby no 3 at any moment, so hope that goes
well.
Recent
flying trips saw Bryan Smy make a valiant attempt to get to Popham. He got as far as Newark and had to turn back
due to fog, but had a fantastic trip back by the coast. There have also been a couple of day trips
across to Oban/Bute.
Dates for your Diary
Isle of Wight – there’s a massive trip being
organised to the Isle of Wight, with hundreds of folk already signed up. It’s taking place the weekend of 29th
and 30th June, with a trip to France planned immediately
afterwards. If you are part of the
Scottish Microlights email user group then you’ll know all about it. If you’re not, but would like to join the
group, please contact Norman Mackenzie at norman.mackenzie@btconnect.com
who set it up in the first place and knows how to join. We’re part of the group but I haven’t the
foggiest how we got into it any more!
Technophobes, I’m afraid, both of us.
Gigha – well, I phoned the Gigha
Hotel the other day to sound them out since the islanders bought the
island. Everything has changed of
course, with William no longer running the hotel or even living on the island
any more. I didn’t get very good vibes
from the chap I spoke to (he hadn’t heard of us and when I hinted that William used
to come and meet us to help us carry fuel etc he didn’t offer any similar
help). Anyway, the upshot is that if
anyone fancies going then do feel free to organise it yourselves, but we won’t
be going. We’ve had some great times on
Gigha and personally we don’t want to spoil the memory by finding things have
changed so much. So we are suggesting a
change this year, for those who are of a like mind. We can’t go any weekend as Gordon is fully booked every weekend
into August and having had some time off earlier in the year we don’t think we
can justify it. We are however thinking
of taking a few days off the week after the Isle of Wight trip (ie the first
week of July) and perhaps going to Oban/Mull/Islay for a couple of days (leaving
on the Monday probably). If anyone would
like to take a couple of days off work and join us then we’d love the
company! Let us know what you’d like to
do.
Perth Fly-in and Fly-out – the Perth Fly-in is taking
place on Saturday 25th May and we have been told that there is
camping available, keg beer and BBQ on the Friday and Saturday nights. Landing fee is free, but you need to be on
radio.
Marcus
and some of the gang from Perth are then flying out on Sunday 26th
for a week’s trip around the west and north of Scotland, visiting some of the
islands. They are welcoming anyone else
who wants to join them, though they don’t have a fixed itinerary, to my
knowledge.
Round Britain Rally - the annual rally is taking place from Thursday 6th to
Sunday 9th June and East Fortune will be a check point for
competitors. If the weather’s good we
might get a few folk in and they’re often grateful for a quick cuppa and
perhaps some fuel after getting so far north.
If anyone’s around to make them welcome, so much the better.
Plockton – we are definitely going to
Plockton this year! We will be going up
the weekend of 10th/11th August and since the PFA Fly-In
is scheduled for the Saturday, and we’ll basically be grounded that day, it
makes sense to get away somewhere! Not
sure how long we’ll be staying but we plan to trailer up and back. I know that lacks the spirit of adventure
but we have keen memories of how tired we were after a trip in 1997 when there
were 20 of us and every night was party night.
The idea of flying home in less than perfect conditions after 3 nights
would have been a fairly knackering prospect.
Driving was bad enough, but at least we could stop for a coffee en
route! I’ll be getting names together and
will get info on B&Bs etc for anyone who would like to be ‘organised’.
We’ll
be organising our own Fly-In but haven’t got a date in mind yet. We’ll try to get a date organised before the
Safety Evening on 30th May (nothing like a deadline….) and we’ll let
you all know then.
If
anyone knows of anything else going on or wants to organise something
themselves, let me know and I’ll email everyone and stick notices up etc.
Speaking
of email we now have 61 members on line!
Anyone receiving this letter by mail, who is on email, please could you
send us an email to gordon&jill@eosmicrolights.flyer.co.uk
and you will be automatically added to our address book for the future.
You
may know that we were close to buying a couple of huge portacabins recently, but
decided against it at the last minute since they would have needed such a lot
of work. We’re going to be putting all
our energies into the hangar shortly so the clubhouse will probably just have
to last the summer until we have more time to look around. Lots of you have been great at letting us
know about portacabins you’ve seen advertised – thanks very much! If we see anything stunning, we’ll let you
know.
That’s
all for now, folks, so hope to see as many of you as possible in the coming
weeks and fingers crossed for some decent weather this summer ……
Best
wishes,
Jill
& Gordon