Well, it wasn’t quite as cold this morning, so we didn’t have any more snowball fights or ice-writings on glider wings, but it was still chilly enough that the more sane among us were wearing proper clothing (that would be jeans, long-sleeved shirt with T-shirt underneath, a lightweight parka with the hood up, and gloves) while assembling.  Teammate BZ still insists that he is in Florida and so must wear shorts, but what can I do?

At the morning meeting, I was threatened with bodily harm by a group of hired bikers by SSA ex-chairman Al Tyler for daring to bitch about the SPOT tracking fiasco.  It was all in fun (I hope but I took the precaution of disappearing from the field this evening as soon as I had put my glider away).  It was at this time that I took the opportunity to announce my annual donation to the SSA U.S. Soaring Team fund – this year’s take from Condor XC training was enough for a $2000 donation.  One of the things I forgot to do at that time was to thank all of the pilots who forked up a few (and sometimes much more than a few bucks) to help me pay for the Hawke Tracking subscription for this contest.  I normally pay for a subscription out of my own pocket (yes, I am an owner, but that doesn’t mean I get a free ride – someone has to pay to keep the gerbils that run our operation happy), and then pass the hat to cover the tab.  This contest was a bit strange, as nobody knew whether or not the new SSA system would be up and running as promised, and when push came to shove, Mark Hawkins interrupted his European vacation for a few hours to set up a Seniors tracking site, and I spent a day getting all the pilots’ SPOT URLs into the database).  Anyway, thanks again to everyone for their support – I’m sure the SSA tracking system will work just as well once they get the bugs worked out.

After these wonderful activities, wily (only one more new adjective to go!) weatherman Richard Kellerman (QV) told us that we would once again have a blue day, but this time the associated descriptors were “light winds, higher top of lift, and better climb rates” – nice!  The task call for the day was the typical 2.5 hour south-north-south task with a little bit of a twist.  First south to Alturas with a 25-mile circle, then north to Inverness with a 15-mile radius, then east to Leesburg with a 10-mile radius, then home.  The strategic questions were how deep to penetrate into the Alturas circle, given that it is generally better to the south, and how to manage the Inverness circle, whose western side is much more tree/swamp covered and can be quite weak, and then how to avoid a possible wind shadow effect due to the large lakes surrounding Leesburg.

Out on the grid I once again discovered that WinPilot (and some other files) had gone AWOL on my Avier PNA, and so once again I had to run back to the Micro-Castle for an emergency WinPilot re-installation.  Fortunately this time my config file wasn’t toasted, so at least I didn’t have to reconstruct that too. Unfortunately my airspace, terrain, and waypoint files *were* toasted so I had to put them back on as well (and the airspace file never did come back – I had to rely on my ClearNav for that).  I think I’m now officially done with WinPilot; As I mentoned yesterday, the author did an obviously half-assed port to the PNA/WinMobile 6 environment, and won’t respond to any emails asking for support and/or bug fixes (of which there are many).  I have stuck with WP because of that one feature that I haven’t been able to find in any other nav system, but I refuse to keep something this broken in my glider.

Out on course, the today was clearly better than yesterday.  I didn’t see the huge furballs that we had yesterday, so I surmise that pilots were generally more confident that lift could be found without 40-odd gliders all sniffing around at once.  BZ and I weren’t too worried about striking out on our own or flying with small groups that formed and re-formed as the day went on.   We went a bit farther into the Alturas circle than some, but it didn’t seem to be much of a problem.  However, we did get a bit low and slow coming back north, and as we were circling in a not-so-good-but-good-enough-at-this-altitude thermal, I happened to notice a glider-like object parked in the corner of a field not far away.  My teammate BZ took a look and said “Yep – that’s a glider, sure ‘nuf”.  This didn’t do a whole lot for our confidence, or our speed for the remaining time, as we were then convinced gliders must be falling out of the sky everywhere!  Turns out the glide on the ground was C5, who had landed in that field *on the way out from the start gate* more than an hour ago, in completely different conditions – oh well.

After making it around the rest of the course in good order, BZ and I had final glide from about 25 miles away – or so we thought.  Now one would think that a downwind final with 500′ over at MC 3.0 would be a piece of cake, and that’s what we started with.  BZ was even urging us to go faster, as we would surely pick up lots of energy like we did the day before.  Well, after about 10 miles, we had blown the margin and had to stop in a marked thermal about 15 miles out.  Once again we climbed to about 300-400′ over glide at MC 3.0 and started out again, fat, dumb, and happy – for a while.  After another 10 miles, with 5 miles to go, our margin started disappearing *again*, and now we are struggling to even get home at all, much less get home fast.  We finally did finish, but it was NOT pretty by any means, and other pilots reported having the same problems.  I happened to watch Bob Salvo (RS)’s arrival, and it was an interesting use of the left-pattern-around-the-tree-hook’ technique, which I must say Bob pulled of admirably (my own arrival wasn’t all that much better, but I’m trying to play that one down).

I have been afraid to look at the results, for fear of embarrassment, so I plan to let that go until tomorrow, and then maybe make an update to this post.  Until then, stay tuned!

Frank (TA)