No flying today – a big front was scheduled to come through in the late afternoon, and the weather preceding it wasn’t flyable either.  Most of us did chores and/or sat around BS’ing.  I went in to Aiken looking for a solution to my wing wheel problem.  Seems my tire has developed a large split, which has so far eaten 3 inner tubes – ouch!  Anyway, after finding a 16″ BMX tire at Wal-Mart, I also decided to check in the Aiken Tractor Supply Company store, conveniently located on the same street as the Wal-Mart.  Lo and behold, I found a 16″ bicycle-style wheel with a flexible solid tire – no inner tube, no air valve, no air, no possibility of a flat – yeah!

I also went into Al Tyler’s ACE Hardware store to pick up a new laptop battery I had shipped in, and of course met two or three other Perry glider pilots marking time by wandering the aisles.  As I stepped out of the hardware store to go across the street to the Piggly Wiggly,  I ran across even more pilots doing the same thing.  I started to imagine the whole town of Wagener (all 3 blocks of it) just filled with glider pilots aimlessly wandering the streets kind of like one of those bad zombie movies ;-).

Back at the field, we watched the front roll in with lots of rain and thundershowers, but it was actually a lot less exciting than some of the forecasts had predicted.  Instead of ‘severe thunderstorms’, we got just garden-variety heavy rain and a little bit of wind – ho hum.  A bunch of us were sitting around at the cookhouse, and Scott Fletcher (SF) started taking some pictures, so I got him to email them to me to put in this post – thanks Scott!!

Had a great dinner compliments of Gary and Chris Carter, in their palatial RV.  Fernando Silva (FS) talked about the stuff he is doing to prepare for being the weatherman at Cordele this year, and I was quite impressed with his drive to be the very best weatherman possible.  I’ve done that job a couple of times, and it is very difficult to get right, and very easy to get wrong, so I wish Fernando the best of luck!

 

Tomorrow should be flyable, but we’ll see.  XCSkies predicts a blue day with thermal tops in the 3000-4000′ agl range, with winds out of the north at around 10kt.  Lift values look good – in the 5-6kt range, so it could be a very good day – but blue.  Stay tuned!

Frank (TA)