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Wow, what an interesting contest day today.  This morning when Mark and I were poring over the weather forecasts, we were seeing 15-17,000 msl cloudbases, 5-7kt lift values, and a good chance of cumulus, and this was later supported by Mike the Strike’s weather forecast at the 10am meeting.  Consequently there was general agreement among the nationals pilots that today was the day to hang on to water ballast if at all possible (it wasn’t in my case).

Out on the grid we watched as clouds started popping in all quadrants, and we were all anxious to be up there and on our way.  Unfortunately, getting out of the Logan valley seems to be a bit of a trick, and the sniffers weren’t able to climb until about 2pm, causing the launch start to be delayed until almost 2:30pm.  Then the guys in the front of the grid were unable to climb with full ballast, and they had to make the choice of coming back and relighting with full water, or dumping their ballast to climb and then being slow out on course.  Different pilots made different choices; current overall leader John Cochrane decided to come back with full water, and was heard to say “If I come back again it won’t be with water” ;-).

Eventually we all got up and away with or without ballast (I had to dump half to climb).  Out on course to the northeast we started finding good climbs to 11-12,000 at Mink Creek and Sherman Peak, and lots of good looking clouds to the north and east.  Most people reported getting up to at least 14,000 and some to 16,500.  Everything was looking like a spectacular ‘Logan day’, right up to the point about 7pm where somebody blew the breaker on God’s thermal machine, and everything shut down in a truly spectacular fashion.  Essentially if you weren’t on final glide at 7pm you landed out somewhere.  I landed at Preston airport (about 25 miles north of Logan), and was followed in short order by Dave Leonard (ZL), Gary Itner (P7), and Jim Garrison (AE).  Dave and Jim were self-crewing, so they both caught a ride back to the airport with me when my trusty crew Mark Hawkins showed up.   The rest of the fleet except the 5 finishers were scattered all over the task map.

I have included a screen shot of the Hawke SPOT tracking map for the 15m nationals contest, with all the ‘yellow circles’ shown.  It looks like the map contracted measles ;-).  By the way, I believe that all but two of the 15m nationals contestants here are carrying SPOT trackers (we even shamed Tim Welles (W3) in to carrying a loaner provided by Mark).

Of course the day was heavily devalued, but we don’t have scores up as I write this (about 11:30pm Logan time).  Stay tuned!

TA