I’m writing this Friday morning at 7 am, looking out my window at what looks to be another great day of soaring here at Mifflin. I didn’t post anything yesterday because I was sulking in the Micro-Castle after having turned in a decidedly mediocre performance yesterday. What really hurt is that it didn’t *look* like a poor performance – 254 miles at 62mph, 26% thermalling with a task average of 4.8kt, not great but not terrible off-course deviation percentage of 12%. It was just that everyone else did so much better!
Weatherman Richard Kellerman (QV) was pretty definite that we were going to have a good day. Thermal tops could go as high as 8,000 to 9,000 (they actually went to more like 11,000!), with clouds in all quadrants. Also, the wind was progged to start off westerly 15-20 kt, and then veer more north-westerly later in the day, meaning that the ridge system might well work toward the end of the day. Sport Class had a 4-hour north-south TAT called, the normal setup here when the ridges are considered marginal (the idea was to make running ridges unattractive, except possibly Jacks Mountain at the end).
Out on course, there were spectacular clouds everywhere – a soaring pilot’s dream come true. Of course there have to be some flies in the ointment, and today it was the problem of getting up to cloudbase in the first place – this turned out to be a real challenge, at least for me. The climbs were very strong, but broken up, making them very hard to center – very frustrating. Several times I decided to bite the bullet and stay in a not-spectacular climb to get to cloudbase, thinking that getting up and connected to the clouds was the way to go, only to find my self back down and disconnected a few minutes later.
I struggled and struggled, never getting really low, but never really going fast. Eventually I made it back to the last turn circle (Mill Creek – at the southern end of Jack’s Mountain), where I enjoyed about 50 miles of ridge running at 100kts or so before finishing at Mifflin. As usual, I hit my best thermal on final glide when I didn’t need it, and watch the needle on my brand-new ClearNav vario peg out, and the averager was reading over 15kt for 30-40 seconds.
I’m reminded of a saying I heard once, describing golf as “a good walk ruined”, and I’m thinking that for me yesterday was “a beautiful day ruined” because I should have been just enjoying the heck out of the experience of being above 10,000 over spectacularly beautiful terrain, but instead was obsessing about losing time in broken up thermals ;-(
Ah, well – today is another day – another chance to excel! ;-). Stay tuned!
Frank (TA)
