World Gliding Championship
7-10-10
We finally woke to a very clear bright blue sky. In fact, it might have been a little bit too clear. By eleven o'clock the clouds were few and far between, not very encouraging to our piots To everyone's dismay, the only cumulus clouds to be seen were small and faaaar away, above a distant mountain. . I was on grid duty today, so I headed out to the field almost directly after the Pilot's meeting. I went around the grid to all of our pilots, searching for someone who needed help before launch. Unsuccessful, I ended up reading under Mike Smith's glider, grateful for any shade I could find. Two hours later saw a change of plans for the intended task. Each of the three classes were presented with a shortened version of the original task, titled task B, in hopes of a lower land out rate. After about two and a half hours on the grid, Lilly and I headed back to the team headquarters to dutifully listen for start times.
Things started heating up only seventy minutes later, when we received our first land out notification. And then our second. And then our third, followed by a fourth. Although those were hardly encouraging, we soon had good news. Nothing could have brought us more joy than Sean Franke's radio transmission of "Yankee Base, this is SN, Twenty-five kilometers out, final glide". And then we heard that Ryszard had passed the finish line before landing about a mile from the airfield. All in all the day ended up being better than we were expecting, and more importantly, all of the crews had successful retrieves.
That evening Grandpa and I went out to eat with Nancy and Bill Snead, along with Peter Deane. We ate at a restaurant just down the street from our hotel with wonderful food, and equally delicious desserts. After dinner we walked back to our hotel and arrived home sweet home to a nice, cold hotel room.
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