Day Three - Still Nothing to Report

What happened to day two?  Rain.  Rain happened.  Day Two was spent most definitely, most depressingly, and most decidedly not flying.  So on we go to Day Three!

Day Three had some hope and some potential, but when the sun came up it revealed another grim situation.  The entire valley was filled with clouds.  The people in the valley probably called it "fog", but from our lofty vantage it was clearly a massive, unbroken cloud.  When clouds or fog keep us from flying we call it being "socked in", but I'm not sure where the term comes from.  Maybe it's because, when your drowning in fog, everything looks pretty much the same as if you were wearing a sock over your head.

Task committee calling the day off.

The Team Challenge is a competition centered around thermal soaring and thermals are formed by the sun heating the earth, then that hot air swirling upward through the atmosphere's natural temperature gradient until it reaches the dew point and condenses into clouds.  Puffy, white cumulus clouds, which are an excellent sign of lift.  There wasn't much hope of any of that happening, but the task committee decided on a few goals for the day anyway and met repeatedly as the day went on to delay the start-time for the meet due (or "dew"... ha!) to the fact that the clouds in the valley just weren't burning off.

At about two in the afternoon the committee decided that the day over and all tasks were cancelled.  Bummer.  There were more than fifty gliders set up in the grassy area behind the Henson's Gap launch and more than fifty pilots eager to do some kind of flying at this hang gliding meet so something had to give.  Luckily for us, the fog eventually did burn off and the wind slowed down to a very safe, comfortable level (even though it was cross) and we were able to get a little practice in.  Nobody expected to have very long flights, but even a short flight is better than no flight at all!

A pilot launches at Henson's Gap.

The meet directors turned this into a "launching and landing" clinic by setting up video cameras on the launch and in the LZ (landing zone) to document our launching and landing techniques.  Later in the evening we all sat in the pavilion and participated in reviews of every single launch made for the day.  It was a fabulous learning experience - Mike Barber and Dennis Pagan can spot a potential launch problem from a thousand miles away!

The landing zone filled up as about fifty pilots enjoyed short
 flights in the mild conditions.

There were a few less-than-perfect launches, including my own during which I let my nose get too high, and a few less-than-perfect landings (mine was fine) that resulted in a couple of broken glider parts, but, thankfully, no broken pilots.  We will review the landings in detail tomorrow night, as it took about two hours just to go over the footage of all of the day's launches.

At the end of the day, because it was not an official competition day, my team gets to retain it's coveted position just right of the launch ramp, so we piled up our gliders and sheltered them under JC's UltraSport.  We'll be back out there in the morning, and the weather is finally starting to look good!  

JC's UltraSport - aka Mother Hen