Day 6 at Uvalde

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Well, this isn’ t going to be much of a post tonight, as I have to go back to the micro-castle soon and sharpen the knives I plan to use later for my ritual suicide.  However, since I only have plastic cutlery, I suspect this will work about as well as my soaring today. ;-)

Conditions this morning were completely overcast, and hadn’t really started to break up even by the morning meeting.  This meant that the day would start late, and our weather guy told us it would probably end by overdeveloping later in the day (hopefully after we had all returned to Uvalde and landed).  By launch time the overcast had turned into reasonably nice looking cumulus in all quadrants, but not very high – kinda looked like a nice Ohio day, except about 9 million degrees hotter ;-).  I managed to hook into a 4kt thermal right off tow to 4500 msl, and thought “hey, this isn’t too bad”.  Then just 10 minutes later I was down below release height, 10 miles from the airport, wondering what the heck happened.  I managed to dig out of that one, but that turned out to be my pattern for the day; get a climb, dig myself into a hole, dig myself out of the hole, get a climb or two, then dig myself into another hole.  Repeat until finished.   My trace for the day looks like the path of a drunken sailor, and I spent so much time below 2000′ agl that I almost landed from pure exhaustion.  Only the sure and certain knowledge that I’d never live it down kept me going, and I did eventually make it around the course.  Somehow the really good guys find a way to make it work, and today it was Erik Nelson (5E) in 15m who found the golden path with a winning speed of 128 kph (fully 30kph faster than my effort – ouch!).  In 18m, with almost the same task layout, Bruce Taylor whacked everyone again in his borrowed ASG-29 with an astounding 137 kph – woof!  The open class guys had a MAT task, and Bill Reuhle dialed the winning combination with an 83.9 mph effort

As a side note, Gary Carter (HK) and I decided we would try team flying on our own today, and boy was that a laugh!  Turns out this team flying business, although fun, isn’t quite as easy as it looks.  Gary and I managed to stay together for about 10 nanoseconds after the start gate opened, mostly because I was convinced I knew what I was doing and wasn’t listening to Gary (who *did* know what he was doing).  I forged straight ahead, thinking that for sure that next cloud was going to work.  Gary  moved off to my left and probably had a good chuckle waiting for the dust cloud to appear when my glider hit the ground.   I think it was Al Tyler (8H) who told me just yesterday that team flying only works if both participants think their job is to put the other guy on the podium.  Clearly I failed that test, so maybe we’ll try that again tomorrow, after I’ve had a couple more helpings of humble pie ;-).

TA