I had a call from a landowner in the morning today saying that he has a perfectly serviceable airstrip with two runways 800m long, and why did all the gliders landed in a rotten paddock when they could have used his strip? Why indeed? Anyway he's mowing it today so it should be easier to see. He'll be disappointed if a glider doesn't drop in one day during the comp!
Today the weather was a bit problematic, in that we were not sure if it would be a really good day or a really bad day. The temp trace indicated that that once the trigger temperature was reached, gliders would be able to get very good height, but that this would not last for very long, and when it cooled down the convection height would drop again quickly.
After much deliberation the task committee set a 2.5 hr AAT task, the same for both classes with Bellata Silo 40km and Barraba Aerodrome 30km as the two areas. Club class gridded first and Sports class second.
Prime news came out and interviewed me and Bruce Taylor - possible some others too, and filmed the gliders, and the start of the launch. If it was on it would have been on tonights local news, but I missed it. Probably just as well!
We started launching at 12.30 and sent off the first three gliders on the grid. Then waited to make sure they would climb out OK. They seemed to be doing OK so we launched the rest of the gridding row, and the next. There were a lot of gliders all at the same height - not very high, so we held for about 5 or 10 minutes until they reported that the climbs were going about 45ooft. We restarted the launch, and got through the rest of the fields as fast as we could. We had an extra tug today, but were so short of people to run ropes and hook on gliders that it still took us longer than yesterday to launch the field. We really need some young fit people for this job!
As I am writing this, a change has just come through, a few spots of rain and strong winds. So the weather will be quite different tomorrow I imagine.
The gliders all came back except two today. One of these has landed out every competition day so far, but luckily for his mates, he was only at the Sky Ranch today. Gliders reported achieving heights of 10,000 feet. I notice that most did not start on task until well after 2pm, and the fastest sports class glider only flew 30km further than the fastest club class glider!
Most traces were submitted to the scorer in a timely fashion, but we had to chase a few. One of the problems is that pilots do not use the same logger every day - makes it easier for Chris if they do. Only the outlanders + one other is missing, so the scores are more or less complete.
Bruce Taylor won Sports and Paul Mander won Club class.
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