Tuesday Day 10 - Contest Days 5 - 15m, 6 - 18m, 7 - Open

Good Morning Canada

We have blue skies but but the heat is back with a predicted high of 34 degrees. The forecast calls for isolated cu with bases of 4500 to 5500 ft for the peak hours of the day. We are fairly far east in the central European time zone which means that the sun day is ahead of the time. Based on previous experience, thermal activity dies quite quickly after 5:30 pm.

There is a weakening cold front approaching from the west which should not affect the contest area today but could shut us down tomorrow. The tactical question is how many days are going to be left.

Our gliders are on the grid - take off will be 11:45am

Day 9 Results - Jerzy in 5th Place!

The weather man was too optimistic again today but the task setting was conservative enough to compensate for it. There were no land-outs today in the Canadian Team. It felt great to just welcome our pilots back, pack up, go for dinner and then retire.

Jerzy was a bit down at the dinner table because he thought he had made a tactical mistake and lost precious time. The score showed him in 29th place for the day with 801 points. I am sure the problems with his Cambridge computer just before launch didn't help to put him into a good frame of mind.

We were overjoyed when we looked at the overall scores for the competition after dinner, to find Jerzy had actually moved up from 6th place to 5th place despite being a bit slow today.

Willem felt better today and completed the Open Class task.

Thanks for all your encouraging messages. Please keep them coming or post comments to the blog - I will relay them to the pilots. They help a lot to keep the spirits up as we go into the final stage of this race!

Slow flight but I moved to 5th

To my surprise I moved to 5th , I expected that my poor result will put me out of 10, but it looks that other competitors were slow as well and it helped me to survive in the first ten .
Four days to go, two pilots ahead of me blocking 3rd position, but spread points is very small behind me and those pilots are pushing hard.
Jerzy

61km/h in 18 meter glider

61km/h was average speed during yesterdays task until we landed in the field.
I don't know how we were able to fly in such conditions , very weak thermals spaced 20km apart 10-20 gliders working together to find thermals. We were not able to climb higher than 600-700mAGL. The last thermal was the thermal which decided about results. Long low final glide to the field. At 200m we were still cruising covering an extra 5km.  I arrived close to our third turnpoint found a nice field and landed close to the road. Just 5 minutes later a British pilot Phil Jones landed beside me. To my surprise my crew Maria and George showed up just one hour after my landing report , retrieve was without any problems.

Tail End Charlie

As we were sitting at the airport restaurant for dinner tonight the last 15 m trailer from yesterday's mass landout rolled onto the airport 25 hours after landing in Serbia.

Apparently the Serbian police were very helpful and provided an english translator and a dedicated phone for him to use from the police station to assist in the retrieve. 

There were two problems that caused the late arrival:

1.  He landed in a field that was a long way off the main roads and was basically impossible to drive into with the car.


2.  He was again held up at the Serbian border on the return trip for about 4 hours as they wanted to know why he didn't return last night with everyone else.

 I saw a lot of wet, muddy and inaccessible fields in the 20 km before I landed. Sure glad I picked a dry hay field beside a major road and between two relatively large towns that were "easy" to find.