Dave's Day 1

For the first day we were given a racing (or assigned) task.  The 18 m task was 553 km and went east, then south, then up to the NW.  I averaged 131.6 km/hr and that has me tied for 15th place with about 5 other pilots.

The blue and red lines on the route below show where the Sea Breeze impacted the task.

At the morning briefing we were told the sky would be juicer today and that some debris from yesterday's storms that was hanging around the Gulf would blow our way.  The expectation was that this would have limited impact on our task as it would likely come in to Cotulla (about 25 km NW of our second turnpoint) around 5 pm.  A couple of the models that I looked at suggested it could be a bit earlier and at launch time, I could alredy see some storm tops off to the east.

The blue line shows where the sea breeze front was located as we were traveling towards the second turnpoint.  We had isolated showers for the run along the second leg and the last climb was 39 km from the turnpoint and occured where the blue line crosses my trace.  I climbed with a gaggle up to 7000 ft and then we set off at best L/D to cover the distance to the turn through completely smooth air on the wrong side of the rain.  In the 10 minutes that it took gliding across the hole, a couple of cu started to develop just west of the tunrpoint.  I headed towards them and there WAS lift - saved!  A group of us climbed up and then backtracked 5 km into the sector and then came back to the same clouds again and climbed to 6000 before heading across the rest of the hole westbound to another line of cu on the good side of the line.  This required a deviation from the course line of about 50 degrees, but when we arrived, the clouds worked and we were back in racing mode.

The red line on the trace shows where the sea breeze affected the task at the end of the day.  For the 18 m class the effect was minimal as I was able to climb to 8200 ft about 5 km short of the turnpoint and then glide into the turnpoint and home.  The trip home did require another large deviation to stay on the good side of the sea breeze, but once I knew I could make it, it was time to point the nose for home and glide into the dead air once again.

The open and 15 m guys had more trouble with their last turnpoints as they were 40 and 30 km behind the line.  This caused most of the open guys to miss the last turn, but the 15m guys were able to glide in and then reconnect with the clouds in the hills and limp home.