I have been asked by the contest management here at Logan to stop posting my reports on the official SSA site, so henceforth these reports will be available only on SoaringCafe.com.  Apparently I was using the ‘U’ (Unlandable) word a little too often for their taste.  I freely admit that a lot of the areas that from this flatlander’s perspective looks unlandable may in fact be perfectly safe from the  point of view of a Logan regular, but hey – I’m not completely dumb and it looked pretty scary to me! ;-).

Today was declared a rest day for the 15m guys, and Day 5 (last day) for the regional contestants.  The rest day was announced at the morning meeting, and I presume it was because today’s weather forecast was for relatively weak, blue conditions.  This was a bit of a PITA for Mark and I, as we were already assembled, ballasted up, and on the grid (along with W3, XG, KS and others), but welcome nevertheless.  Mark and I are now ‘flying’ a new 3-turnpoint speed task, consisting of lunch at Chick Fil-A (first time I’ve ever eaten at this chain), laundry, and chillin’ at the Micro-castle.

One of the side entertainments available to us here at Logan is a marine Osprey aircraft (the airplane/rotorcraft hybrid) that is conducting some sort of tests on a different part of the field.  In the mornings we will often see the Osprey hovering about 50′ off the ground over a distant piece of abandoned runway here.  When we first heard of this occurring at the same time as the contest, some of us were very worried about the downwash from these things (if you don’t believe it, search YouTube for Osprey and downwash).  However, it has turned out that the Osprey contingent has been very cooperative and their testing has caused absolutely no problems.   At the morning meeting today I was chatting with a real nice guy named Patrick McLaughlin (HH1), and it turns out he owns and founded Mountain High Inc, the maker of the wonderful EDS oxygen system that we all use and love.  Anyway it turns out Patrick was chatting to the marine pilots flying the Osprey and offered to pay for them to ride in John Good’s Duo Discus (MP).  The pilots thought about this a bit and instead of taking the rides for themselves, they let their two top testing support engineers take the rides as a reward for their hard work on the testing  program.  The engineers took the rides and came back raving about the experience.  One of them is a power pilot and declared that as soon as he got home he was going to get his glider license!  Not only is Patrick a true friend of gliding with his EDS product, but he was literally putting his money where his mouth is to help promote soaring.  Way to go Patrick!!

Rumor has it that tomorrow will be a much better soaring day, maybe a real ‘Logan day’ with cloud streets at 17,000 to the horizon in all directions – stay tuned!

TA