LEMONAIDE

For developing the ability to work thermals (or any other form of weak lift) grasp any opportunity to fly, in even the poorest conditions.  You'll learn many lessons from struggling to stay aloft when other, less committed pilots decline to try.  Just stay close to home and settle for anything that keeps you in the air.  Or finish off a good flight by lingering a few hundred feet above pattern height – but outside the pattern – within easy reach of your home field.The ‘house thermal’ might be a perfect place – traffic permitting.   Postpone landing as long as you like, scratching in whatever bits of lift arise.   You’re about to come down anyway, so if you do find good lift and it becomes ‘too easy’, you can afford to move away and look for more weak stuff nearby.   Such unnecessary effort builds discipline and, with the right attitude, it’s good fun.Meanwhile, you owe it to other traffic as well as yourself to be certain that what you are doing is safe – for everyone.   Working a narrow core of unstable and unreliable thermal lift at very low altitude, while watching for and avoiding other traffic, is a very complicated and sensitive task.   Even the most confident pilot must remain ready to abandon pointless heroics and commit to landing at any time.   When you see that you’re circling in someone else’s conventional landing pattern, NOW is the time to land.