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Frank Paynter in his Ventus

The morning assembly and ballasting routine was almost pleasant this morning – temps in the 70’s and enough of an overcast to keep the sun from melting everything as soon as it cleared the horizon.  However, by morning meeting time it was evident that we had a problem in the form of mid-level clouds pushing in from the north, threatening to blanket our soaring area and cut off heating.  The weather guy confirmed what our eyes were telling us, and gave us the additional bad news that the ground to the south and west was saturated with water from last night’s gully washers in that area.  When task setter John Good got up to talk, he started off by saying that when he knows ahead of time that he can’t task to the north, west, or southwest, it really simplifies his  job (not!).  John has done a superb job here so far, so we weren’t worried (well, not very worried anyway).  John’s call was for racing tasks to the east and southeast for all classes, with B, C, and D tasks ready to go in case the mid-level overcast moved in more rapidly or more aggressively.

By launch time it looked like the overcast was moving in, so all classes went to their respective ‘B’ tasks.  Ours (15m) was a racing task east to Devine, south to Piloncillo, east to Uno Mas, then an 80-mile downwind run back to Uvalde.  With the overcast already covering up the Uvalde area we all assumed we would have real trouble getting away, and even more trouble getting home, but this turned out not to be the case.  The launch proceeded smoothly, and as far as I know we didn’t have any relights at all, even with everyone carrying full ballast.  Most pilots didn’t wait too long after the gate opened to leave, again thinking conditions would deteriorate as the high layer moved in and became thicker.  Out on course, was a lot more sun hitting the ground, and there were decent (and some not-so-decent) looking clouds along the course lines.  Cloud bases started out about 5000′ msl, and by the time we turned for home, they had risen to over 8000′ msl, with some climbs in double-digits.  The run home wasn’t quite a classic “start at 3000 below final glide and don’t turn” situation, but mostly because the high layer was still there, and was noticeably thicker as we got closer to home.  At the end of the day, the fast guys were in the 80’s (I heard Francois Pin (FP) and Sarah Kelly (56) were in the 140 kph range, and the slower among the fleet were in the 70’s  and 60’s.

In yesterday’s post I mentioned that Gary Carter (HK) and I tried to team fly on our  own frequency, and failed miserably to help each other in any meaningful way.  To say we stank at team flying was to describe it in the kindest possible way.  However, when we got through laughing about it we decided to give it another try today, and it worked much better.  We stuck together almost all the way around the course, and helped each other significantly.  We did get separated a couple of times, but worked hard to get back together while not letting the effort of getting back together slow us  both down.  On several occasions we would both pull up into thermals in slightly different  places, and one or the other would quickly find and report the core for the other one.   When one got ahead, then it became his job to find the lift, and the other one’s job to catch up (A lot of this is explained in John Cochrane’s (BB) “How to Team Fly” document, which I have attached to this post).  While I won’t pretend that Gary and I were even in the same universe as the much more competent U.S. and other country teams, we also weren’t quite the Laurel-and-Hardy team we were the first day ;-).  Anyway, this team flying business, while not trivial to do, is a LOT of fun, and we here in the U.S. should do more to encourage team flying in local and regional contests.  This option is available already to contest organizers by waiver, and I suspect Ken Sorenson would even be amenable to waiver requests for this option past the normal 60-day deadline (any Llano, Tx organizers listening?).

Tomorrow’s popular forecast is for another typical Uvalde day – cloudy in the morning, gradually clearing to mostly sunny in the afternoon.   Just another day in (soaring) paradise!

Team Flying by John Cochrane

TA