The results: http://soaringspot.com/2009ecc

Tweets: http://ozreport.com/tweets.php

http://skyout.blogspot.com/

http://gottafly.blogspot.com/

http://www.leagull.blogspot.com/

The last day at the East Coast Championship turned out to be a very weak day in spite of the forecast for 400-500 fpm to 2,500'. The clouds didn't clear until 7 PM. The ground was shaded all day.

We twice postponed the start a half an hour, and left it at a 3 PM start time with the last start time at 3:45 PM. We postponed the launch close time finally to 5 PM.

Taking off just after 2 PM I didn't find any lift, and the other two pilots didn't either. Then we waited for another hour to launch again.

Two more launches and I found weak lift on the third flight leaving the six pilots circling in zero over the air strip and getting 10 fpm at 700' and climbing it for a total of 38 minutes for the second longest flight of the day. Jim Prahl got the longest duration flight at 53 minutes. Is this a duration contest?

I wasn't about to quit and at 4:51 I got towed up for a fourth flight. Zack took me to Tom, Paris and Mark who were turning under a thin cu. They had had lift there but when I got there there wasn't any and Paris headed out. I headed out and saw Paris. Mark and then Tom followed.

We just went on glide. Paris was hoping to find some lift but that seemed a bit unreal to me as I could see Terry Reynolds low out ahead and he wasn't finding anything. It was completely shaded.

We were veering to the right of the course line which went over the river and over the small town of Denton. There were trees around the river and few fields along the course line. We stayed over the open fields.

Terry Reynolds who was quite a bit lower landed at 7.4 km out. Tom and Mark landed with him. I was out in front having caught Paris who then turned to see if he could go up with some birds (but didn't). I kept going over a set of high tension power lines heading for highway 404.

There was another high voltage power line and then the highway with a muddy, newly planted corn field across the highway. I decided to turn and land in the grass just next to the highway instead.

Paris was behind me and saw some birds turning and going up fast just to the left of my glide path. He was headed for them but we were both too low to get up with the birds. He landed across the highway in the corn field. It wasn't that muddy after all.
 

#	Pilot	Glider	Distance km	Total Points
1.	Paris Williams	Aeros Combat L 13	8.3	11
2.	Davis Straub	Wills Wing T2C 144	8.2	11
3.	Terry Reynolds	Wills Wing T2C 144	7.4	10
4.	Tom Lanning	Wills Wing T2C 144	7.4	10
5.	Mark Frutiger	Wills Wing T2 154	7.3	10
6.	Charles Allen	Icaro Z8 12.9	5.4	8

The final results can be found at the URL above.

The scoring with SeeYou went very well over the network. David Glover downloaded the GPSes and stored the IGC files automatically on my Public Downloads folder. I had instant access to them and I was continually updating the scoring on line on the Soaring Spot as new track logs showed up. It wasn't automatic on my part (as you can't quite do that with SeeYou), but it was pretty easy.