Good Morning! Day 2 Starts Soon Here in Uvalde!

9.oo: What a day yesterday!!! Straight away on day 1 pilots had to deal with circumstances they had not experienced during the 7 practise days—avoiding showers!!! Some pilots really had to go through them and got wet; others had to fly around them losing time. The result of this weather and the circumstances was quite a few outlandings on day 1. A pity as you lose points straight away on day 1.

Looking at the results and they are preliminary and not all pilots have been scored yet, we see some great winners and not so unexpected.

in 15m: Sebastian Kawa [Poland] is a TOPPER and the SZD business should be very pleased and proud he is flying their great looking Diana 2. With a nice speed he rushed his glider back to Uvalde at 138.2 mph, followed by French pilot Christophe Ruche with 138,0, costing him 2 points. Ten outlandings in this clas and one pilot not yet scored.

in 18 m: former world champion and another TOPPER, Wolfgang Janowitsch from Austria won the day and received 995 points [136.9 km./h]. Looking at the scores, Australian pilot Tom Claffey [ see picture below] got 50 penalty points, is on spot 8 with 950 points, so could have had 1000 points and won the day. His mate Bruce was already very happy yesterday when he still thought Tom might have won the day. What went wrong? He missed a TP by 0.008 km, but his backup logger was scored. Tom flew the best speed: 137.3 km/h. Only 3 outlandings in this class!
Current World champion from Poland Zbigniew Nieradka was 2d with a speed of 135.5 km./h.
In open class: French pilot Laurent Aboulin won the day in the Quintus with a speed of 139.1 km/h. Bruce Taylor in the JS 1-C was 2d at 137.1 km/h. Of the 26 pilots only 9 finished!!!!! Open class was most “hit” by the rain as they “met ” on their way back to Uvalde the storm coming here, where in the end it never arrived.

Nice to see two new types of gliders in this class win the first day.

Look at the sand/dust over the runway yesterday during the first landings. Picture courtesy Gary Carter with his cell phone.

Some shots from yesterday with the tension while waiting for the finishers by the Finnish team.

 


Art [Grant], steward and Hannes [Linke], juror  keeping an eye on things!

On the Gaggle Talk site,….I will insert it when someting comes up in each blog to avoid confusion.
Here we go:
—Talking about Finland, Katja arrived. She was the webmaster in 1995 when I was steward there during the EGC with on the first day a 1000 km task set for open class. Nobody really wrote about that and I asked if it would be a problem to write while being also a steward. Nobody objected, so I started to write my stories on one of their computers. Great fun!

Katja designs the most beautiful websites, did the one for the JWGC in Musbach a year ago and the one for Poland next year. Have a look. Here is Katja.

I  know how dedicated she is to her iPad so I showed her and a friend straight away the system to get on the Internet.

—You don’t know, but one of the best places to hide for a few moments to get cool are the “porta-potties”. They are fully air conditioned!!! There are two less cool, read very hot ones on the site as well; we call them low-scale-porta-potty.

Off to briefing!