1 Aug - Dave's Practice Day 5

Conditions for today were blue thermals, except for a few wisps on the first and second legs.  The task was a relatively short 3:15, so I had planned to start around 3 PM to get home by 6:15.  Before the start, I had trouble finding an 18 m gaggle in the start area, the 18 and 15 gates overlapped slightly and I raced off towards a gaggle only to find it full of 15 m ships.  Eventually, a group of 18 m gliders joined me in a thermal and we worked our way up to 8000 ft sometime around 3:15 and I was ready to start, but no one else was making a move.  We circled our way down to 7500 ft and I finally had enough and left.

 I had planned to fly with a group today since it was blue, but decided flying a little slower by myself and getting home by 6:30 was a better bet than playing games at the start line and running out of day on the final leg.

I covered 435 km at 131 km/hr today, and that will be on the slow side of the scale for my class, but I flew relatively conservatively and saw only a couple of other gliders during the entire flight, and only one of them was marking a thermal.  My timing for the task was good, coming in 3 minutes 45 seconds overtime, but since I cut the 3rd zone short, I had no option but to go all the way across the 4th zone.  In hindsight, I would have been better off going a little deeper in the third, but at the time, the computer was showing something like an hour overtime if I went to the centre of the remaining turnpoints.

The Canada ground team had a good test run today with all three pilots flying, and we were able to do some ranging checks on the ground station.  With the antenna at the hotel connected to our main ground station, we were able to talk out to 120 km, so that will cover most of the task area.

Tomorrow will be another rest day for me, then one last practice day on Friday.

Dave