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First, apologies to all for writing this the morning after, but Mark Hawkins (of Hawke Tracking fame and my crew for this contest) had to run out after I landed and pick Dennis Linnekin (DL) out of a hayfield north of Preston (about 25m north of Logan). Dennis made a real nice landing in a rolling field, complete with hay bales (can you say ‘hay bale slalom’?).
This morning dawned completely blue, and basically stayed that way all day, with 10-15kt winds out of the southwest at ridgetop all day. The morning meeting was full of horror stories from yesterday’s suicide run dodging rainshowers and monster cloudstreets. Then Mike the Strike confirmed what we all knew already – it was going to be a blue day with no possibility of clouds in our soaring area, with max height in the 9-10,000 range (yikes!)s
The regional guys got a MAT task that allowed them to run up and down the main ridge, but us poor 15m nats guys got a MAT with two ‘gotchas’. The first one was a first mandatory turnpoint at Meade Peak, which forced us all into the Bear Lake valley, without sufficient climb height availability to get back out! The second gotcha was the elimination of the Sugar Creek turnpoint from our list of valid turnpoints, meaning we couldn’t run the normal main ridge MAT triangle, assuming we somehow managed to get back from Meade Peak in the first place.
At grid time, we 15m guys were in the back of the pack, miles and miles from the launch point, and hours and hours from launch time. Most of us just baked in the sun, but a few smart guys like John Lubon (JL, flying in the regional) sat in the shade in the hangar and watched everyone else bake! ;-). Another smart one was Jim Garrison (AE) who towed his glider around the launch grid (we had to push everyone up to the launch point) with his car, sitting in air-conditioned comfort while the rest of us burned to a crisp.
The regional FAI class was declared to be a ‘No Water’ day, and it rapidly became an ‘unofficial No Water’ day for the 15m guys, as everyone who bothered to tank up dumped their water either on tow or soon thereafter to have any chance of getting up in the start cylinder. Most pilots started out the side of the 10,500′ cylinder, as it was very difficult to climb above 10,000 (not a good sign when we needed about 12-13,000 to get back from Meade Peak. The ‘fast’ guys in the 15m class seemed to be the ones who went up the main ridge to Mink Creek very slowly, looking for any climb high enough to transition to the Mead Peak range, and then somehow managed to get back to the main ridge. Once back on the main ridge, then the idea was to run it up and down a couple of times to get the average speed back up.
There were a lot of landouts (but not as many as yesterday), but unfortunately there were two more broken gliders (added to the one from Day 1), but as far as I know, no injuries to pilots.
Today looks blue and not very windy again, so who knows what devious plans the task committee has for us today. All I can say is, after two contest days I’m already looking forward to a rest day! ;-).
TA
