Garret Willat, WGC 2010

Tomorrow is the official practice day of JoeyGlide 2011 in Kingaroy Australia. The planning for us started back in March’ish, when Adam Woolley mentioned we should come fly. Adam is the CD and has been working diligently for the past year preparing for this. I met Adam during the first JoeyGlide in 2004 when I came in 2nd behind Adam, there is an article on that experience in Soaring September 2005. The age limit had been increased to 30, however I am entered as a mentor. I am flying Adam’s Cirrus 75, which will be a slight change to the Open Class I have been racing for the past 5years. Renee decided this sounded much better than Uvalde last August and the whole family is here. This will be Nadeen’s first contest as she was only a few weeks old when I left for 2010 WGC in Hungary.

Kingaroy Soaring is a few hour drive from Brisbane and from the ground it looks like lots of fields, known here as paddocks. We are staying in the bunk house which is the old hospital and has roughly 8 rooms and looks like it has more beds than when the hospital was in operation in 1945. The clubhouse is about a 5min walk towards the airfield from there and there are multiple hangers, one of which the Cirrus is sleeping, many filled with gliders. There is lots of grass here and plenty of room for the 24 Juniors to tie-out there gliders.

My first year of racing was the last year you could use a camera for scoring. So I can say that I did fly a few contests with a camera. Then GPS came in and has changed the contest experience, scoring, quickness forever. This being a junior and the Juniors being slightly less rigid in their ways we will be scored using DittoLog’s, for those of you like me that have no idea what this is before arriving here check out. www.dittolog.com Each competitor will be flying and using DittoLog as their primary logger. When we land and roll to a stop the DittoLog sends the IGC file via WiFi direct to the server. Once there it is auto-uploaded to SeeYou every 60sec and automatically scored. That being said, before you taxi and park you can log on your laptop or smart phone and see your scores. In 2008 in Germany we were able to email the files to the scorer. The procedure was we would land and the Team Captain Sam Zimmerman would meet us at the glider drive back to the US Team booth and send them to the scorer via email. No offense but Sam your job has been taken over via technology. The Scorer should be able to spend most of their time at home as it is all done automatically. That being said there are still back-up loggers and we can hand-in files or email as needed.

It is late and the girls are beyond restless and ready to go to bed, so more to write later.