PPL(H) Hours 4.5 to 5.9

It's typical... as I look out my window right now, at 6PM there's a bright
blue, calm and cloudless autumn sky. Perfect flying weather. When I turned
up at the airport this morning it was raining, 8/8 cloudbase at 300 ft, with
about 1 mile horizontal visibility. No good. I was about to turn tail and
go to work (thus saving the day's pay) when the instructor turned up. We
knew it might be poor this morning, and had planned to do hover practice if
we didn't have the ceiling for anything else.

Taking advantage of what we thought was a cessation of the rain, we rushed
out to the helicopter. I did the checklist and startup in pretty much a
record time for me, eager to get out there and dry some grass! It wasn't
looking good though, the rain had started coming down again and we were in
danger of misting up. Still, my instructor thought we could clear it, so we
headed across to the practice area beyond the runway and we settled into a
hover. I was given the controls but I really counldn't see much a all, only
a feint orange shape through the mass of refractive rain drops on the
outside of the canopy that was the wind sock. So, after about 30 seconds or
so we gave up and scuttled back across to the apron. 0.4 hours in all, for
about 30 seconds of useful flying. (My wallet cried in pain.)

Two coffess, one sandwich and much hopeful eering out the windows later and
we started to see blue bits in the sky! So, we took advantage of this
"sucker's gap" as I heard it/us called, and headed straight out again. This
time the rain didn't return, but the low ceiling (now at 800 ft) remained,
and so we spent about 20 minutes practicing hovering, and I slowl got
better. Every few minutes the instructor took the controls, whizzed us
around the field to cool the cabin and the engine and to give me a rest
before settling back in to a hover again.

Once I'd got comfortable with hovering we did tried landings from the hover.
I totally ballsed the first one up, and didn't put nearly enough right pedal
in and it yawed left and rolled a bit to the right, enough to make me gasp a
little, but the instructor was there and caught it. Second was a lot
better, and I landed it in roughly the right direction! Next I tried a take
off and after customarily following the instructor on the controls had ago
on all of them myself. The first one was a bit sloppy, the nose wandering
around as I stabbed randomly in the direction I wanted to be in with my
feet, but I brought us into the hover and we tried again. I was practicing
landings between each take off, and was getting the hang of them well now.
I really get a psychological urge to pull the collective up a tad just as we
reach 3 or 4 feet from the bottom, but of course I shouldn't as this is
where the ground effect is catching and cushioning us. It's a battle to
resist the urge though. It was getting windy by then, and at one point I
came down to 3 feet and without lowering the collective at all carried on
descending right in to a (slightly) heavy landing. We concluded that the
wind had changed. It'd been gusting 10-20kts and it picked up at just the
wrong point and blew my ground effect away. So, a couple more tries and I
got a perfect landing and take off pair done. Next was hover turns, but it
was getting just too windy so we headed back. 1.0 hour logged, 1.4 for the
day. Next flight is Wednesday next week.

Si