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Up with Tim Welles (W3) and his crew David at 0800, off to the airport to assemble, water, and grid. Snuck into the informal race camp briefing at 1000 to hear that we were going to have another day with brisk winds out of the south, blue, with top of lift around 14,000 – whoo hoo! Grid time was announced to be 1pm. After the meeting I was in a real panic even though I was already out on the grid line, because I knew I had to go back to my camper for my PDA and to get some lunch, and it appeared I didn’t have enough time to do it – oh, wait a minute – my watch says 12:30, but its still on eastern time – its only 10:30! ;-) That was just the start of my time zone woes, as my cockpit clock and my ClearNav both had to be adjusted as well. I’m getting to old for this.
Speaking of getting too old – my launch today was a real eye-opener. I was full up with water, and the 172 that was towing me apparently had the option of keeping my speed up (much appreciated) or climbing, but not both at the same time. We were still at 500′ agl 3-4 miles downwind of the airport – scary!
Conditions were weak initially with, with most of us ‘scraping rocks’ to stay up. I managed a 700’agl save with full water – not a good way to start a contest. The pre-practice task was north to Mead Pk with a 20 mile radius, southeast to Kemmerer with a 30 mile radius, north again to Wagner Mt with a 20-mile radius, then home. The folks who braved the Bear Lake valley to get over to the east ridges did fairly well, although there was at least one landout (at an airport).
I didn’t want any part of that, so I stayed in the cache valley and ran north and south along the main ridge and also southwest across the valley to Brigham City where I got to view the ‘Pac Man’ lake pointed out to me by Bruno Vassel IV (B4) in our Condor session earlier this year The Logan soaring area has a lot of no-landing zones, but if you are careful you can usually stay within glide of an airport. Of course, when conditions are good and you are cruising along at 17,000′ – landable or unlandable terrain doesn’t really matter. Hopefully we’ll have lots of the 17,000′ days and none of the ‘rock scrapers’.
TA
