We had a good day of flying on Saturday.
The weather was interesting. There was good lift above 4000 feet, but it was quite tricky getting up there. It suddenly ended when the rains came at 4pm. There is no solace in the realization that the rain showers are "widely scattered" when it's raining where you're standing (or flying).
Before the cooldown, Steve, Tim, Tom, Pete, Faraday, and Sonny had decent soaring flights. Faraday made her first sustained climb in the Blanik. She thought it was pretty cool that you can make a 1000 pound machine climb using just solar energy. Her instructor agreed.
After the rain, Jon took advantage of the really smooth air and made his first unassisted complete flight from takeoff to landing. Congratulations, Jon! At the very end of the day, Rich went looking for signs of reheating, and was able to stay up for a while in 3J.
A few of us got a chance to practice circling with other gliders as the Region One contest transients blew through our area. Their task that day reads like a tour of Vermont soaring sites: Sugarbush, Post Mills, Springfield, and back to Sugarbush. That last step (back to Sugarbush) was the tricky bit. Nobody made it, and three of them landed at Post Mills. We were good hosts.
On Sunday it rained all day.
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FYI, "Widely scattered" actually meant a more or less continuous swath of showers reaching well South of VSF and well North of Sugarbush and PM.
They were moving at something under 10 mph W to E which afforded us contest guys the opportunity to get out ahead and do some soaring while keeping a close eye on the back door. There were three strategies tried to get back to Sugarbush from the Springfield turn area: left, right and center.
I chose right and it almost worked: there was a long E-W cloud street a little beyond Dean a/p that ran back towards the Hungries. Getting to it involved crossing a wide blue area. I attempted this and possibly could have connected, but by the time I was approaching Dean airport it was clear that the street was dissipating short of the Hungries and nothing was taking its place. So back home to PM. The run up the middle looked completely undoable, but a few pilots tried it anyway and landed somewhere in the vicinity of Washington VT.
The interesting thing to me was that a couple guys tried the back door to the left: running W from Springfield into the Rte 7 valley South of Rutland and counting on recycling convective conditions after the showers. This works in some parts of the country -- usually drier climes. I've never seen it work here, but that doesn't mean it won't ever. See Lee Blair's flight here for the left end around attempt. Very cool.
http://tinyurl.com/5gsf3p
-T8
But that's a big-risk strategy. Distance credit on the third leg depends on how close you got to Middlesex. Lee's westward deviation didn't help much in that regard.
True. Lee's strategy would have been a better bet with a little more wind from the West. The way it worked out, there was no way to get home with 15m wings, so Tim Donovan's strategy of wringing max distance from the 1st two turn areas, then landing at an airport for the airfield bonus was the best. I had thought of doing that, but hadn't completely given up on completing the task.
-T8
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