Day 1 at New Castle (Region 4 South)

I got here yesterday (Tuesday), after having watched the practice days and the two rain days from my home in Columbus.  I was determined to be the indicator of good weather coming, rather than the ‘bad weather jinx’.

This morning while running, I met Gregg Leslie (GL) and Karl Striedieck (KS) also out on morning fitness runs around the airport.  Later as Gregg and I were cooling off from the run, we talking with Gregg and Tim Welles (W3) and the subject of my el-cheapo single rigging system came up (consists of two wing stands and some carpet wrapped around a piece of plastic drainpipe).  Tim then announced that he had a new marketing name for my product – “A single-man rugging system” (get it – carpet roll – rugging system? – yuk yuk!) ;-).

Today turned out to be a good day, and very interesting.  the Call was a three-circle TAT that basically ran us southwest to Blacksburg, then northeast to Riverwood, then southwest again to Mountain Lakes, then northeast home.  Weatherman Richard Kellerman’s call was for either blue or over-developed (really!), with the betting on blue.  As it turned out, it wasn’t either one, with some blue areas, but mostly plenty of clouds.

Most pilots ran basically center to center, and the clouds were plentiful enough and the cloud bases were high enough to support that without too much worry about landing options (dare I say that large parts of the New Castle soaring area are marginally landable at best?).  I decided to take the high road (literally) by staying over the higher ground to the northwest of New Castle on the second leg, which was spectacularly beautiful, but slower than the direct line (bummer!).  As far as I know, there were no landouts and everyone got home safely.

Dinner tonight was low country boil, and in over 10 years of enjoying this particular dish at New Castle and at Perry,  I believe this was about the best one I have ever had.  The spices were just right, and the shrimp was spectacularly tasty.  This is going to be a hard one to beat!

Tomorrow’s weather looks to be as good as today’s, although probably bluer than today – bummer!  Stay tuned….

 

Frank (TA)