The weatherman's cartoon today had no frogs in it so now I'm totally confused. The Contest Director announced that he would buy every pilot a beer tonight since there were no airspace infringements or any other problems the previous day and he wanted to thank the pilots.
The task was 357km with cumulus clouds.
Lisa Trotter has had some problems with the GPS signal from the volkslogger to Winpilot. We decided to give her another logger but that needed a different cable and there was a problem with the cable so we reverted to the original logger, which is now behaving better. Must be because we threatened to replace it.
Thermals are forecast to exceed 2000m with climbs in excess of 2.5m/s. Just about need oxygen over here I think.
I mentioned the other day that many pilots have sponsorship and carry a logo on their glider or trailer. They are generally paid enough to insure the glider for the year (approx E 1,000 or more, although I was told they'll take anything they can get).
We launched the girls into a sky that had been blue but now had cumulus forming. However, there was a lot of cirrus moving in from the west that concerned us.
Back at Aussie Base, we turned the radios onto the team frequency and waited for the start. We ate some lunch and fended off the swarm of European wasps who were as keen to eat our lunch as we were. They are almost as numerous as flies here and are attracted by any food smell.
The locals make a wasp trap by combining fruit juice, vinegar and dishwashing liquid (to lower the surface tension) in a drink bottle. Some holes are put in the side for the wasps to crawl in it. You can see we have a few live wasps in the trap, but in the week we've been here, we've caught a lot. The dark mass you can see in the upper half of the liquid is wasp corpses.
It was our turn to BBQ tonight so Keith and I went shopping. It's really hard to figure out what meat you are buying when the cuts are different and you can't read the labels.
The girls had a good day and were back in just over 3 and a half hours. They have done approx 96kph. Unfortunately the winning glider has done about 10kph more and our pilots are in 10th and 11th position for the day.
They had a reasonable day with Lisa Turner (IGC traces: Lisa Turner, Lisa Trotter) leading out for the first and most of the second leg. There was streeting and it was sometimes difficult to pick the street -- or not follow it into airspace or another country! Again the forests and clearings in the forests worked well as thermal triggers.
Keith decided that I had taken all the photos but not been in any, so as I was setting out on the bike to take more photos, he borrowed the camera and insisted I put a photo of me in -- so here it is. Me on a bike.
Being the weekend, a number of motorgliders have arrived, some with small tents stuffed in them. There is a super Dimona, a Motorfalke with tricycle undercarriage (both these gliders have aerotow hooks and can be used for launching), a Ventus 2CM and an ASH26 here tonight.
Some geese fly overhead in formation as we are preparing our BBQ. They are headed North so this must be a good sign. They are loud!
We enjoyed a nice BBQ while discussing whether one of the German guys made sushi well enough to invite Akemi, the Japanese pilot, to dinner.
Not sure what will happen tomorrow. The Cirrus has thickened and become an overcast. We'll just have to wait and see.
A new thing is on the official website for you all to play with. Select the link http://webs.idu.de/gliding/fwm04/ then select either Gemeldete Teilnehmer (By Pilot) or Flugtage nach Klassen (By Class). You can choose up to three flights to look at simultaneously. Then select Markierte Flüge auf der Karte anzeigen (Show these flights on the map). It takes a minute or two to load. Have fun.
