Day 6 - Dave

Last night was International night where many of the teams provide food or drink from their home countries for all to sample.  Between the set-up, manning the Canadian table for a while and doing some tear-down at the end of the night, I didn't have time to get to the blog until now.  Our day was canceled today due to the amount of rain that came down over night and continued until about 11 am.  The 15 m guys are on the grid on the paved runway, because the grass is too soft, and might go fly in 2-3 kts lift with 25 kt winds and 4000-5000 ft top of lift.

For the international night, David Cost-Chretien, a Canadian that now lives in Sydney supplied us with Smoked Salmon, Maple Tea and Maple Toffee for our Canadiana.  David runs The Canadian Way and imports and distributes Canadian items in Australia.  Besides donating all of the food, he also spent most of the night at the table serving the food.  His enthusiasm and generosity are greatly appreciated!  We also served up Forty Creek Canadian Whiskey and it was a big hit, with several people telling me it was the best tasting drink of the night.

Team 4D and Aussie Dave manning the Canadian Table

Yesterday's task was a 384 km racing task, once again in the blue.  Before the start I was getting to about 5400 ft and once again huge gaggles formed near the start point.  The forecaster and task setter advised that a high cloud deck would move in about 1730 and shut down the day.  All of the weather sites that I looked at said the same thing.  With this in mind I decided to start at 1400.  Once again, the models were wrong and the late starters flew in much better conditions and were able to beat the early starters.  I don't know if they have better weather information or whether they just took the chance that it wouldn't come in as quickly.

I didn't have any particularly bad or slow spots during the flight and kept moving on course.  I started a few minutes behind a group, but after about 60 km, some of them were gone and another was 2000 ft below me, so I ended up on my own for a while and then met up with a couple other gliders near the first turnpoint.  By the second turnpoint, I joined up with more gliders and we had a group of about 8 that eventually worked its way down to 3 and we ran towards home.  About 50 km from home, I felt some good air to my left and turned into it and was rewarded with the best climb of the day.  For several turns it averaged over 9 kts and overall it was a 6 kt climb for 2000 ft that put me on a fast final glide home.  The other two that were with me missed it and ended up taking weaker climbs and were slower getting home.