Over the next twenty minutes or so, Spencer felt the glider being buffeted by the wind increasingly forcefully. He looked at Dad; his face showed concentration.
‘We’re yawing,’ Dad said, pointing to a string on the windshield that was leaning to one side.
‘What does that mean—“yawing”?’
‘We’re sort of skidding in the air,’ Dad said. ‘It’s normal to do it a bit when you’re gliding, but this is too much. I’m going to adjust the rudder.’
‘What will that do?’
‘Point the nose to the left or the right, and correct the yaw.’
Another gust of wind slammed into them; Spencer felt himself rise off his seat momentarily.
‘I don’t like this,’ Dad murmured, moving the stick. ‘This weather’s getting nasty.’
Spencer clung to his seat. ‘Should we go back?’
Dad hesitated briefly, then said, ‘Yes, actually. I’m going to roll us away from the mountain.’
He pushed the stick hard, bringing up the left aileron and lowering the one on the right, and they began to curve up and to the left, away from the angular bulk of Bluff Knoll.
Dad always knows what to do, Spencer thought. He’s been doing this for years! It’ll be fine. It’s always been fine.
Dad picked up the two-way radio and spoke into it: ‘Drifter to base, Drifter to base, do you read me, over?’
There was thick hissing and they craned to hear anything at all through it.
Dad picked up the two-way again and spoke clearly just as they copped another wind-slam: ‘Drifter to base: we are heading back; I repeat, we are heading back due to deteriorating weather conditions, over.’
As he slotted the radio back in its place, Dad’s face took on a look that Spencer wasn’t so familiar with—a sharpness and intensity—and it made Spencer’s guts drop. The Drifter had now turned a full 180 degrees and they were heading due south, back towards Skippers Cove. It should be okay. Spencer tried to calm himself. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, he chanted silently, not quite rocking.
But thoughts couldn’t change the wind, neither the direction nor the strength of it. Nature always won, didn’t he know that by now? A whopper gust picked them up from underneath—like a giant hand might—and flipped the Drifter back against the mountain, hard down. The trees met them first, branches like electricity poles through the windscreen, then the earth greeted them, wrong way up, in a soily, thudding, brutal welcome.