Rat Race – Task 1

29.35km - Woodln-Rabies-Woodrat-Burnt-Flyair-Purcel

 

After finally fixing my wing at Tiger and getting everything sorted out I had a great drive down to Woodrat with no delays and arrived on Saturday at 3:30pm.  Passing by Grants Pass I saw around 7 gliders in the air on a blue sky day and was happy that even in the high pressure conditions folks were managing to get high and fly far. After a great nights sleep in the Holiday Inn Express at Central Point I headed to HQ.

There are around 15-20 pilots from Washington state here with 12 or so from Tiger representing 20% of all the competitors so it was fun to see everyone in nice weather and having fun.

On launch, conditions were light and the inversion layer was around 5500ft, 1200 over launch, so they set the launch window to open at 12:30 with a start time of 2:00pm with a 1km start cylinder. I got in line around 1:15 and was in the air by 1:25 after waiting in line.. A lot of pilots were at their first comp so I was curious to see how the gaggles would be. The air was punchy in places for sure and you could see folks getting a few collapses. It took around 20 minutes for me to get up to the main gaggle circling at around 5200ft.

Just as I got to the gaggle I saw one wing slightly below take a 40% collapse, cravat and then spiral for 4 turns before the cravat was undone and then it rook a big frontal and recovered…wow! Scary to witness this for sure.

I was now circling in the gaggle turning right with around 30+ other pilots and it wasn't that comfortable, especially being a right turn day. Then the lift start to disappear and we were all sinking about 7 minutes before the start gate opened. I couldn't believe it , within a couple of minutes the flush had taken a lot of pilots to around 200 ft over launch and we had all now bunched up. Flying low to the ground with everyone scratching was not to my liking so I decided to take a different approach and head out to mid launch where I saw 1 or two others getting lift. My tactic didn’t pay off! There were bullet thermals kicking off but real hard to try and stay in them. I seemed to get kicked high and then sink lower than where I started. Inevitably I sank out and my day was done!

Looking up I could see quite a few gliders coming down to the same fate as me. In all there were 15 or so from the pack that sank out immediately after start. Above, I could see Arun and John managing to stay high and heading across to Rabies. As it turned out, Arun made goal for the first time in a comp (well done laddie) along with Chris Amonson and John came close, getting to the last turnpoint in the task.

For me the best save of the day came from Matt cone, who somehow coming in for a landing managed to get back up from around 300ft over the lz. He got back up to the launch height and decided to just turn and go on glide down the valley as a reward for all the work he had done!.

15 pilots got to goal this day and a lot of others were spread out across the course. Minimal distance points for me was 139 with John picking up just over double that for all his effort. So feeling not too bad for today’s task given its a left hard turn day.. rock on!