Too Slow!

Today was the best soaring day of the contest with thermals up to 5 kts and 5500 ft, but it also had its challenges and some of them got me.  Before the start we were able to get to about 4500, but the lift in our start area was weak as it was along the first leg and into the first turn area.  I decided to turn early, since the second turnpoint was still 150 km away and the leg home another 100 km.

On the second leg there was a large blue hole and I had some trouble getting across and was down to about 1500 AGL and dumped some of my water before I was able to climb away.  Once across the hole towards Romania, the cu re-appered and there was good lift and some streeting.


On the leg home, the cloudstreets were just about 90 degrees to our course line, so we had to jump from street to street and it was approaching 5 pm, so I wanted to stay high because it looked like the clouds were not really pulling lift from the ground anymore.

At some point on the leg home, I glanced at my computer and it was still showing 91 km from home, but the PDA was showing about 45 km.  I had to turn off the power to get the computer restarted and then it didn't show the correct final glide information.  I used the 1000 ft per 10 km rule of thumb to eyeball the final glide and was able to make it in from that point.  I took a couple of turns about 25 km out to make sure I was OK, but as it turns out, those turns cost me a couple of minutes and 1 km/hr or about 30 points.  My speed was way too slow for the day and my low score reflects it!