Bishop Hill, GM/SS-187, in the Kingdom of Fife, it's still winter!

Well it's May, now.  Ian was looking forward to coming on SOTA activations (for the walk) and dozing in the sun with his book while I did the radio bitty.


Thanks to well known VHF/UHF op Reg (g8vhi) posting on facebook I now knew it was "World Naked Gardening Day",  (it remains to be asked how you knew, Reg?)

So it was obviously going to be warm and balmy, right?

So why, as we were sitting in the car park just outside Scotlandwell was the car saying 4C?

"Perhaps we won't bother", I said, as an unexpected heavy rain shower passed through...   But it only took me getting out of the car to smell the mountain to decide we really were going.  Anyone familiar with that unique scent of a hillside will know what I mean.

The walk up from Scotlandwell/Portmoak church gets quite pretty very quickly as the view west over Loch Leven opens up

it's a steepish hillside and you suddenly seem to have gained a lot of height

It's only just over a leisurely hour to the summit

 and that included several minutes sheltering from a passing, suspiciously crystalline, rain shower in the lee of some rocks.

The weather didn't seem too bad on top, with lovely views of West Lomond::

 and East Lomond

But hang on, doesn't that look rather like a snow shower behind it?  Not to worry, the forecast was to improve....  So it will?  Right?

After a bite of sandwich we set up the aerial and started out on 40m,  Nice to work Don g0rql as second qso,   all but one of my activations have Don in the log!  ( and the one he missed wasn't Dons fault, the sky was broken on Ben Tirran, we struggled for any qsos!).   40m was slowish but we have a number of other regulars too, thanks all whether regular or not!

So now to 20m.   Not many QSO's but again several regulars,  always nice to hear Manuel EA2DT,  who always sounds so happy!  Nice to work from S51HX in the east (Slovenia)  around to KA1R in the west (MAss', USA) .  Very nice to make my first GMA S2S qso to DG7MEJ/P on DA/AV-346 and a SOTA S2S to Michael,  DB7MM/P on DM/BM-248.

Unfortunately things started to go slightly wrong then,  the radio was fine but that improvement in the weather didn't...!

Keen eyed folks will see the snow going quickly past my face,  heading west

The view of Loch Leven rapidly vanished:

and a glance down showed that we were being "settled on"

By this time, the log was starting to get very wet, as was the radio (which I rapidly covered) but it clearly wasn't going to get much better for a while,  by this time we were getting quite cold despite wearing the same winter gear we were wearing in January!!  I'm sorry if there were still folks waiting on 20m for us, but we had to take the decision to bail out and pack up quickly, there were more snow showers on the way.

even though that one was heading rapidly west.

The walk down wasn't too bad, even if the wind was so cold it hurt your teeth,  but at least we retained visibility

We got down pretty quickly,  at the bottom I was amused by this sign just along from the parking,  it seems you can't take it with you, but you do get to keep the car

 

All that remain to say,  is,  always plan your walks to end at a pub serving Real Ale (In this case Inveralmond Thrappledouser).

Cheers

Andy

gm8oeg