32.881678,-111.854982,Francisco Grande, Casa Grande, Arizona,
USA

http://soaringspot.com/scfr14/

The remnants of the hurricane left the area leaving behind enough moisture that
we had good looking cu's starting around 9:30 am and lasting all day. The
forecast is for the moisture to hang around for a few more days so perhaps we'll
have more cu's on Friday and Saturday.

With light to no winds in the forecast, cu's, cloud base maybe up to 7,000' and
moderately good lift we called a task back and forth for 60 miles:

The sport class had a smaller version of this task.

We started launching at 12:30 PM with the first start window at 1:50 PM. The
lift was light at first but as we got higher it improved until we were all above
6,000' just staying out of the cu's. We would find 200 to 300 fpm near cloud
base, nothing to suck us up into the cloud.

Not much of a start at 1:50 as we got low, so almost everyone came back and
found much better lift and took the 2:10 start time. There were cu's every where
on the course.

I was high next to Zac and we raced as fast as possible to the Casa Grande
mountain but the lift there was piss poor. We were working junk when my vario
died. Turns out I had created the perfect storm to cause the battery to be flat.

I had installed a 16 GB SD card that also serves as a wifi server in my Flytec
6030 (allowing me to transmit track logs to my phone where they can be emailed
to the scorekeeper). The server portion turns off after 5 minutes to keep the
battery from being drained if it doesn't hook up with a client. But, I had
placed my phone in my boot and turned it on to run the Livetracker24 app with
the phone plugged into an add on battery. Previously I had used a dedicated
tracker24 but Belinda was complaining that it would die after an hour.

But I had mistakenly left the wifi setting turned on on the phone so that the
phone and the wifi server on the SD card in the 6030 were communicating and
keeping the wifi server running and running down the battery.

With the 6030 dead I headed back toward the Francisco Grande hoping to get there
high enough to land and leave my glider set up. I landed about a kilometer short
and hiked the glider back.

Meanwhile pilots who weren't fooling around with wifi servers in their 6030's
were out on the course and doing well. We got to see Kraig, then Bruce, then
Robin all come in far ahead of the other pilots.

All and all a great flying day after two days of not flying.