The glorious 12th, the start of the Grouse shooting season on the North Yorkshire Moors, saw a less violent but no less competitive start to Task Week, the annual, internal soaring competition for the YGC’s experienced and not so experienced glider pilots. The week provided 5 task days with 2 days developing very good thermic afternoons from non flyable mornings. Tasks based on turn points  having an ecclesiastical, railway station or river bridge theme with an AAT thrown in for good measure, allowed plenty of scope for pilots of varying experience and total kms flown exceeded 1,600 on each of the two better days. The flexible scoring system ensured that no person could win more than one day and gave bonus points to special endeavours and successes. These included points for two Silver C distances, a Silver C duration, one leg of the Cross Country Diploma and a first field landing. With no one able to reach any of the tasked turn points on the last day, due to a fresh headwind and weak thermals, points were given for trying, as evidenced by time in the air.   As well as awarding a shield and a bottle of wine to the daily winners, Mug of the Day awards were made, including one to the YGC CFI who landed out due to personal plumbing problems. Winner of the Task Week Trophy was Rob Bailey in his ASG29t, who as well as accumulating the most points, also accumulated an impressive set of low saves, which he accounted for by referring to his previous life as a hang glider pilot.

More conventional tasks were also flown during the month, with around 3,200 km of flights recorded on the National Ladder. These included the use of a sea breeze front early in the month to record some fast leg speeds and some abandoned tasks on the next day as conditions deteriorated further south but remained good in the local area. Some nice curtain cloud on the sea breeze front near the North Sea Coast is shown below.

A good morning on the last day of August progressively clouded over as a front approached from the north west more quickly than forecast, with the result that only two of the pilots flying cross country returned without having to use their engines, although two pilots who had flown down into Norfolk in East Anglia, covering 380 km, had to resort to their engines 25 km from  the site as the rain came.

The latter half of the month also yielded some good wave days with a Gold C height gain achieved on the 22nd of the month and a number of  pilots climbing to between 10,000′ and 15,000′ asl on the 28th.  This wave day was also used to fly cross countries, with around 470 km flown and the good conditions are nicely illustrated by the next photo.