Hi On Saturday , Alice in Wonderland and I (along with 10 other gliders from Darling Downs Soaring Club) worked our way around a 200km course - DDSC, Warra,Jandowae N, DDSC).
Unlike most of the others (the Pooch outlanded and the Hornet turned back), I found this quite hard work but very rewarding. The day was blue with a light northerly wind, but despite this there was lift around. Alice's GPS marked us a useful thermal during the launch. On release, we headed back and found it easily as there was so little drift in thelight wind...we were on our way up. Once everyone else (we were second to launch) had launched and climbed out we set off on task. About half way along the first leg I made the terrible mistake of not taking a great thermal, simply because I could see the some of the other gliders ahead of me. Alice leapt at the thought of climbing but stupid me had 'press on itis'! As a result of this and having to take a substantially poorer thermal not long after (sorry Alice) I put us at 1700' AGL about 70km from home by direct line and much further on task as we still had to round Jandowae North! I had a field picked and circuit planned; mind you, calling something about the size of an English county a field seems rather inadequate! In a last ditch effort to stay aloft, Alice and I were trying Bert Person's advice to search for lift along the downwind edge of an area of trees - and Alice first found and then slowly (oh so slowly) guided us up to where we could go looking for something better. The radio suggested we might 'cut the corner' and head home, but Alice quietly assured me that she didn't mind if we ended up in a field, even that was all part of the fun - so we headed for Jandowae N. We eventually scraped around that last turn point, listening to everyone else calling their final glide and set off on track for home - nearly 90km to go and we were already sinking through 3000' agl. We were very much alone, but in air turning to golden haze beneath a brilliant blue dome as the afternoon shadows lengthened below. It was definitely time to dredge up more thermal finding advice as we headed towards the next potential outlanding 'county'. Flying along the west side of some foothills of the Bunya Mts, gently warmed by the westering sun, turned up a good climb - but at the top we were still 2000' short of final glide. At about 40km out we found another good thermal. As we were most definitely last, Alice suggested we just enjoy it and fly to the top - so we did, arriving home at over 3000' agl having flown through heaps more lift. There's an interesting gliding corollary to Murphy's law - there is always lift around once you have final glide! For the last 10km we zoomed along with full negative flap at 100kts and even then we flew through a large patch of lift that had us climb at 1kt on the averager for a while. We landed after just over 4 hours in the air - at an average speed of nearly 60km/hr on task...sorry Alice, that's hardly what you are really capable of, but I'm still learning how to do this. I'll do better next time, I will...I am learning, I really am! -- Robert Hart [EMAIL PROTECTED] Strategic IT & open source consulting +61 (0)438 385 533 Brisbane, Australia http://www.interweft.com.au -- * You are subscribed to the aus-soaring mailing list. * To Unsubscribe: send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] * with "unsubscribe aus-soaring" in the body of the message * or with "help" in the body of the message for more information.
