Rat Race Practice Day – June 12th 2010

After a 7hr 45min non stop drive down from Redmond on Friday 11th , I arrived at Grants Pass to have a not so hot sizzler grill dinner and then headed to the Holiday Inn Express where I had a very restful night.

I headed off after breakfast to sign in at HQ where I was pretty surprised to see a  large  group of people already in line to sign up. Weather was beautiful with temperatures in the mid 70’s expecting to reach the 80’s by midday and a nice cool breeze blowing through. The mandatory pilots meeting took place which covered the ground rules of the competition and then we headed up to launch.

Today was pretty laid back and they set a short task of 23Km of Launch to LZ (start cylinder), then to Rabies, Burnt, Rabies Peak, Woodrat and Longsword to complete the task. The challenge today was that most gliders were boating about 500-750 ft over launch around the12:30pm mark, with the start scheduled for 1:40 and getting high looked as if it would be  a problem.

Talking about problems, Gilead repro’d the problem I had been having on previous years with the Digifly Cartesio plus. His lost all waypoint before the start and he was not too amused. However, his expectations were that the damn thing probably wouldn't;t work anyway when he got here so he wasn't;t that too perturbed. However, we shall be letting Digifly know they have a serious problem with that unit. Was I bummed too? No, as I had purchased a Flymaster B1 Nav a few weeks back and it worked like a dream during practice. It seems to be a popular unit too now as there were a lot of them being used at this comp and many units being sold during the day. Even Frank and Chris were thinking about getting one to use this week.

So now on launch, I got suited up and stood in line and boy was it a big line! It took me the best part of 45min to get near the start due to the fact that we could only get 2 people off launch at a time from the North launch as the wind was a little squirrely when it did blow or non existent at other times. You could see the nerves of folks on launch…took me back a couple of years when I got here for the first time.

Today however I felt pretty good. I took off and joined the folks trying to get up.I had medium success. It was a right turn day and I am not efficient turning that way. I stayed in the thermal with a few others but one of the pilots was a little erratic flying in and out of the thermal in front of me and turning back in sharp which bugged me a little so I headed off and towards Rabies.  I saw that folks who had taken off earlier were already getting to Longswords and I could see they had a headwind, so a convergence must be setting up somewhere between Launch and Longswords. I thought I would head out that way and see. Sure enough there was a lift band heading towards Rabies. I took that but slid off it and got drilled. Hmm, I turned around and headed back towards the hill on the other side off launch but by now I could see most folks who were in  that vicinity sinking out. Ah well, glad it was a practice day. I landed and headed off to Fiasco Winery where I spent a nice afternoon chatting with Pam and the lassies sipping wine and eating a chees and fruit platter.

A nice way to spend the first day here. Tomorrow the actual comp starts and its a left hand turn day so I will plan to get high and stay high tomorrow. We shall see ow that works out!