Day 2 was another challenging day and I had another slow day. There were rain showers scattered throughout the task area, but had the largest impact at the second turn area, and then on the last leg home. I had to fly through some heavy rain about 25 km from Leszno on the final glide. About 15 minutes after I landed, it started to pour at the airport and some pilots had to wait out the storm before they could finish and land.
During the flight, I kept seeing the same gaggle, so I thought I was doing OK, but it seems they all picked up 10 extra km in a couple of the turn areas and that made the difference.
I am trying to analyze my flight against some of the other flights to see where I made mistakes, but I am having trouble seeing material differences in some of the statistics. The only thing that really stands out for today was I flew and extra 11% distance above the task distance and the other flights were 4 and 5 %, so on a 380 km task, that makes about an additional 20 km of unnecessary distance.
Below is my flight trace combined with two other traces. My trace is the red one. From this, I see that I flew the same route as the blue, but green drove really deep into the second turn area. This is where we ran into our first wall of rain today. Just before the rain, I had a great 7 kt climb to 6000 ft and then was able to run the shelf of the rain front into the turn area. The green guy decided to take it further, but then had to deviate a long way west on the way out. However - he won the day. Probably based on that extra distance.
The barograph trace shows that I used about the same working band as the other two pilots.
So the goal for tomorrow is to try and deviate less, but on a day with rain in some quadrants and blue holes in others, it seemed reasonable to make the deviations at the time!
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