Big Spring US Nationals
A shorter report today as I didn't get to goal so I had less opportunities to collect stories. One thing of great interest to me is how we on the task committee have been either very lucky or very smart. Today there was a twenty percent chance of thunderstorms in our area, the panhandle. It looked like the dry line would be active on our western side. It also looked like there would various thunderstorms around, but just where was unclear.
The winds were supposed to be quite strong out of the south, and it was 20 mph at the airport at 10:30 AM. There were lots of left over mid level clouds floating around and only a few cu's.
Looking over all the forecasts (XCSkies/RUC, Dr. Jack/Nam, Dr. Jack/RUC), FSL - wind profile) we felt that we should go north to the Town and Country airfield with a 5 km turnpoint at Lamesa to keep the pilots up on the friendly cultivated fields.
We waited, as we have the last few days ,to open the launch at 1 PM, because there were so few cu's around. There were lots of high clouds filtering the sunlight and supposing lift. There were cu's to the east.
I was third to launch at 1:15 PM. Third is important as we have three tugs, so the first round gets the first three pilots. And today they had to take us 6 km to the south west (if they headed off in that direction) before they got to any lift and dropped us off. We did find some weak lift there and climbed 800' under the cu. The long initial tows really slowed things down (and pilots didn't get in line to launch at 1 PM, so they wasted 15 minutes).
I heard from Shapiro on the radio that he was getting up much better on the eastern side of the runway so I headed over there and sure enough was soon at cloud base at over 8,000'. O'Brien and Zippy soon joined us as did Glen and Terry. (Chris, Terry's wife, is listening to us on our frequency, so Glen and Terry know where we are.)
We had gone over to the east to get under the cu's to find the lift, but this left us 11 km to the right of the course line and the course was to the north northwest. Given the chance for over development we all took the first start time at 2:15 PM. Me with one second to spare.
We headed north northwest to the next clouds. To our west there were high clouds causing quite a bit of shading. Further west there were a few sparse cu's and a sunny north/south area Further west there was evidence of the dry line. There had been a cu-nimb just to our east when we were in the start cylinder.
We continued north northwest getting further away from the course line but heading toward more cu's. The problem was that there was significant shading ahead. It wasn't clear how we would get through it. 40 km out we were on the edge of the shading and climbing slowly in two separate thermals. We all got back together at 50 km, 23 km east of the course line, and climbed at 240 fpm over a large shaded area to 8,800'.
We were now almost due east of the Lamesa turnpoint. We all headed out to the west to get to the turnpoint. After finding little bits of broken poor lift I got a few hundred feet lower than the rest of the crew. This was not a good sign for me.
I headed southeast to the sunlight over the cultivated land. I then saw Bob turning in front of me just before I found the lift that the rest of the guys came and joined me in. Down to 1,700' AGL I turned in broken lift averaging 250 fpm. Unfortunately, I didn't stay in the thermal when it got weak. I needed to stay in that no matter how weak. I really needed to go back into it when the Jeff's left, as they were 1,000' over me and the thermal got weak for them also.
I had another opportunity to get back up, but left that also when it seemed broken and weak. This put me on the ground. Patience, when will it fill me up?
Everyone else got back up again. Jeff O'Brien and Zippy made goal. Glen did also as did Derreck the last time I checked. We'll have an update in the scoring later.
Derreck brought a backup glider in case he destroyed his first one so he was flying that second one today. He put a fence post through his first one yesterday as well as taking out the control frame.
As I was breaking down southeast of Lamesa. The OD began in earnest. There were three cu-nimbs to the east and south east of Lamesa, but it was clear ahead toward goal. There was plenty of OD around Big Spring as we came back, and it was clear that we had threaded the needle again like on the last two days. Tomorrow looks like we will have to do that again. There is a huge cu-nimb just to our east here in Big Spring as I write this. No rain yet here.
I'm proud of our ability to choose the best options for a task given the difficulty of the weather forecasting this year at Big Spring. More often it is very simple to know what to do on any given day here, but not this year.
The radar at 4:45 PM:
We went up the middle of the Panhandle and you can see the cu-nimbs to the east.
Here is what it looked like at 8:15 PM, twenty minutes ago:
http://OzReport.com/1250300410
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