RR Report

Rick Roelke sent this report to the MWSA mailing list today:

Talk about ending on a "high" note, we could not have had a better day to finish off camp.

High man for the day, and the entire encampment was Jim David, topping out at the limit of our airspace at 28k!!! The fact that the lift had improved, and he was still climbing at a solid 2 kts begs the question of just how high could we have gone that day.

Yours truly flew just shy of 400k (horizontally) after a quick diamond climb (40min). Later in the day I saw 12kts of lift down low, and it was pretty much a 5kt climb near 18k.

There were many diamonds, a few lennies, and much gold. It was a bit windy 60+kts at altitude. We were commenting early during the encampment that we had not seen a really high day with clear weather, well this one was truly clear. In the morning we had a well developed cap cloud, just to add some scenery to the dawn launches. Later in the day it was completely clear and it hit 75 deg on the ground. Last year at the same time we were dealing with snow.

Very special thanks goes to Roy Bourgeois who flew up the GBSC Pawnee on Saturday to arrive for Saturday tows, then with reports of 80kts on the summit, bravely started towing at first light on Sunday. He towed all day then returned home late Sunday via Post Mills to drop off the PMSC Blanik. Yeoman service indeed.

BTW the reason for the Pawnee coming up was to cover for the Post Mills Birddog that was out of service for mechanical problems. So additional thanks to the GBSC board who approved the "rescue" effort, and willingly donated the equipment. Members of GBSC, PMSC, and FSA all benefited from the efforts…

All in all, it was a great encampment. Somewhat time skewed by a batch of bad weather during the scheduled weekday operations, but with some flexibility Post Mills swapped weekends and it provided a great extension to camp.

Till next year…

RR

Rick correctly points out that our success on the final two days was made posssible by some creative thinking on the part of the GBSC Board of Directors and some heroic volunteering on the part of one of their towpilots. We definitely owe them.