Well it was another great soaring day in the Land of Enchantment. We were all a bit bummed to see that Mike wore his blue hat to the morning meeting. However the lift strength and top of lift forecast was as good or better than yesterday. Clouds? We don’t need no stinkin clouds! CD Tom along with his advisors sent both the FAI and Sports classes out on Long MAT’s today. I was looking forward to this as I’ve thought the concept was pretty cool and always wanted to fly one. The task can be difficult to call and at least for the Sports Class I think they did a good job putting together a task that didn’t force us (or at least me) into a corner of having to come home way early or add on a lot more miles.
The first secret to my success today was to abort my first takeoff. Crosswind combined with my CG hook on Kate plus the slightly angled takeoff that is standard at Moriarty all combined to have the glider going one way and the towplane another. It was my shortest “flight” ever, about 40 feet ahead to the corner of the ramp, jumped out quick and pushed off to the side. I don’t even think we held up the next takeoff so that was nice. I was a little worried about being at the back of the grid then since we were on a 3.5 hr task today instead of 3 like yesterday. All concerns vanished after my second (successful) takeoff when “Tow Dog” the souped up 175 took me straight to an awesome dust devil at the bottom of a gaggle. Zoom I was up to about 15,000 feet before I knew what happened and the task was open.
I was a bit more careful to get under the max height for my 2 minutes this time and started out the top of the cylinder on the west side of the circle. Conditions were better than yesterday, even though it was 99% blue. On the way to the first turn I was headed towards a scraggly cu wisp when I saw a strange white object floating above and in front of me. A plastic bag! Well I figured that was as good as a cu and got a good climb to start the run north. Michael Westbrook (UN) and I joined up and team flew for about half the task. We had a lot of fun. We are both in Std. Cirri and found the performance between our ships to be pretty equal. I’m sure we were both disappointed to learn that :) For a few legs it seemed that I was gaining on him and then he would beat me. The team flying seemed to go pretty well from my viewpoint and I think we helped each other go faster. We split up near Estancia on the second leg north and never really were able to get together again.
The flight was basically textbook. Amazing when it actually works out that way. I was never low to get really nervous, I went into the downwind turnpoints high and the upwind turnpoints low. There also seemed to be conveniently placed 8 knot thermals at the upwind side of each of the downwind turnpoints to give me a good climb while drifting on course for the next turnpoint. My highest was 16,700 although I heard of a few that made it over 17,000. I had one excursion to just a bit under 11,500 but generally tried to stay well above 12. I did take a few weak climbs towards the end and got well above final glide. I found quite a bit of sink in the Lucy area and downwind of the dry lakes and was happy to have the cushion. I finished just a few minutes over time at about 66 mph. No scores are up yet but I had a great day of soaring!
