I’m writing this post from the cool interior of the Big Boy restaurant almost directly across the street from the Ionia airport.  One of the very nice things about Ionia is the convenience of stores and restaurants to the airport.  There is a Tractor Supply, Wal-Mart and a Meijers right across the street, along with a superb sandwich shop, a McDonalds, a Bob’s Big Boy, Appleby’s and several others.  Sorta the opposite of Perry ;-).

I’m writing this from the Big Boy’s because the aircon in my Micro-Castle may have bitten the big weenie today, just when I needed it to cool down from the 90+ temps today.  RV aircons are notorious for dying when connected to not-quite-good-enough ac supplies, and I think that is what happened to mine.  I have actually gone to the trouble of instrumenting my ac line with a voltmeter to make sure the voltage drop wasn’t excessive, but clearly I wasn’t vigilant enough – Oh well.  Unfortunately I don’t have any down time between Ionia and  Cordele, so I’m hoping I can get it repaired (if indeed it is dead) there.  Looking on the bright side, the long-awaited cold front is supposed to come through tonight, so hopefully I wont miss the aircon tonight or for the rest of the week.

Today was another down day, mostly due to forecast high winds and very poor buoyancy-to-shear ratios.  As it turned out, the winds didn’t pick up quite as dramatically as predicted, so we might have missed a flyable day today.  I am really glad I am just the weatherman here, and not the CD, as this was a very hard call for CD Bob Fidler.  If you call the day at the meeting (as he did), then you are open to lots of criticism for not trying harder to get a day in, especially since it *looked* flyable later (emphasis on ‘looked’, from the safety of the ground).  OTOH, if he had flung us all into the air and someone got hurt in a high-wind outlanding, then it would be “why didn’t the CD pay more attention to the safety aspects!”.  All in all, I’m OK with Bob’s decision – it’s a regional, not a nationals, and we have a number of first-time contest pilots here.  The predicted pre-frontal winds did increase throughout the day, to the point where the treetops were moving around pretty markedly by about 5pm (i.e. just about when we would all have been trying to finish the task).

Hopefully, this darned slow-poke cold front will finally get here and give us some better soaring weather for the rest of the week.  I think one of the reasons the front has been bogged down is tropical storm Beryl (my other brother Beryl ;-)) swirling around down there on the Georgia-Florida border.  Beryl has been trying to track west,  and the cold front here has been trying to track east, and I think they have almost managed to fight each other to a draw.  The reason I mention this is that Georgia (Cordele) is where I’m going next week, so I’m hoping that Beryl gets his act together and gets the heck out of my way.  Last year the Cordele area was suffering from a month-long drought as the contest started, and we had 6 days of wonderful soaring weather.  Somehow I’m thinking that’s not going to be the case this year ;-).

Popular weather forecast for tomorrow is for post-frontal weather, with much cooler temps, dryer air, and  winds from the west in the 10-15kt range.  Hopefully we will finally get off the ground and get a contest day in – I’ve got my fingers and toes crossed!

Frank (TA).