It’s starting to feel like I’m trapped in the “Groundhog Day” movie, but at least each day isn’t exactly like the one before. We have so far found four different ways of not getting a contest day in. The first two days were definite rain days, and yesterday we got close and actually launched the fleet. Today, even with spectacular wave-like cloud bands above us (or maybe *because* of the spectacular wave-like clouds above us), what lift existed was broken up by 15-20kt winds from the southwest, and repeated sniffer flights all resulted in semi-rapid returns to the airport. CD Erik Mann even threw up Baud Litt (LBL), who won a day at the recent Uvalde WGC, with mostly the same result. Baud was able to climb in one thermal, but when he tried to beat his way back upwind, he lost all his gains and was unable to find anything else. After trying everything in the Charlie Spratt playbook and inventing a few new plays of his own, Erik called the day around 2:15pm. Ironically, many of the die-hards who took tows after the day was cancelled did find thermals to 5-6000, with a few even getting wave rides to 13,000′ – what a bummer! Tiffany Fidler (F3) took some spectacular photos of the sky during our ultimately futile wait on the grid, so look around on Soaring Cafe for a photo gallery or something.
And we couldn’t fly!
This was a free day in terms of airport dinners, so the Fidlers (Searn, F2 and Tiffany, F3) and I went into Gettysburg for dinner, and solved all the world’s soaring problems over an excellent Mexican dinner at Montezuma’s. In addition to solving RL soaring’s problems, we also hatched plans for more Condor competitions during the upcoming Condor season. Our plan is to hold a ‘Condor pre-nationals’ over the Thanksgiving weekend (I think 24-25 November) and a ‘Condor Nationals’ over the Xmas-New Year’s holiday weekend of 29-30 December. Each contest will be held in the new New Zealand ‘Omarama HD’ scenery, and will feature full-length (around 3 hours) tasks using U.S. rules and scoring. Stay tuned to Soaring Cafe and Rec.Aviation.Soaring for more details.
After dinner I walked back into the clubhouse to see what I could mooch for dessert, and I found bunch of glider pilots grouped around the TV screen watching a movie. I couldn’t see the screen as I approached, but after hearing just a few words I immediately recognized George Moffat’s voice and knew they were watching “The Sunship Game”. I had already missed the scene where Moffat cuts the tip off his glider with a hand saw, but I was in time for the crash scenes at Marfa.
Popular weather for tomorrow is calling for a blue day with a high of 61, with light northwest winds. There was some talk of high winds this evening as the front came through, but they didn’t seem to materialize (at least not enough to move my trailer around). Stay tuned!
Frank (TA)
