I’m writing this from my Micro Castle at about 9pm, after the traditional burgers and beans welcome dinner here at Perry.  Along with the burgers and beans comes a particularly potent brand of beer from the beer truck, so I’m pretty well snockered as I write this (I’m a pretty cheap drunk, so it doesn’t take much to do the job).

We had a great practice day today, although it was more than a little bit challenging. Weather was windy, with 20 kts or so at altitude out of the east.  Mostly blue, although we did manage to get into some wispy clouds on the 3rd, 4th, and last legs.  Strong thermals in the 6-8kt range could be found, but even they tended to be broken up by the high wind.  The task was a 2.5 hour “Perry Tour” TAT with 4 circles.  First we went west to Aiken, then back southeast to Barnwell County, then northeast to Do Little, then west again to Don Bells (which required us to overfly North Air Force base and circumnavigate the Columbia Class C airspace), and then home.  The run to Aiken was pretty fast with a 20kt tailwind, but then we all had to slog the crosswind leg to Barnwell county.  After Barnwell we started to get into a little bit of a cloud field, but even the clouds were flimsy and broken up with all the wind, and sometimes produced good lift, and sometimes just laughed at you.  Most pilots nicked the top (north) edge of the Barnwell circle and the bottom (south) edge of the Do Little circle, in order to make the line into the Don Bell circle pass outside the Columbia Class C.

As promised, I was on the contest frequency (123.3MHz) all day, and so I was treated to a running commentary of the launch by ace ground ops man Larry, and got to listen in as he and the rest of the crew integrated late-comer John Cochran into the launch flow – great stuff, but not real conducive to going faster out on course ;-).

At the end of the day, good friend and pair-flying partner John Mittell (BZ) won the day with about 60mph, with Erik Nelson (5E) in second and me in third place.  At the dinner, many pilots congratulated John and I on a great team-flying showing, only to go away a bit consternated when we explained that we hadn’t flown as a team today and wouldn’t be flying as a team in the contest.  John Mittell won the day the old fashioned way – by flying faster than everyone else.

Two identical hoses, one pressurized with water, and one not

In the interesting technology department, John brought some new ‘Flex-Able’ water hoses with him.  These are hoses that are somewhat slinky-like in that they coil up very tight when empty, and also expand to 2-3 times their empty length when pressurized with water.  The following picture shows two identical-length hoses.  The one on the left is full of water (pressurized) and the one on the right where John is standing (his right foot is on the end of the hose) has water in it, but isn’t pressurized.  Both hoses are connected to the same Tee connection in the background.  The hoses refuse to kink at all, and coil up nicely either full or empty.  For those of us who occasionally have to do the water-ballast thing, this hose technology is the cat’s meow.  They don’t take up much room in the trailer, are MUCH lighter than a typical garden hose, they don’t kink, and they don’t tangle – nice!   They are available from http://www.flexablehose.com/, and I’ve already ordered a pair of 75′ hoses for my next ballasted contest (Moriarty, I think).

Bill Elliott, my Soaring Cafe landlord, got on my case for not having photos with my posts, so I have included some phone-camera photos of the practice day grid ;-)

Weather for tomorrow (first contest day) looks a lot like today – blue and windy.  Stay tuned!

Frank (TA)