Day 8, Lapse rate and more on the Start Game

Yesterday day 8. Forecast was not good, predicting a blue stable day with weak conditions. In order for good thermals to form you need the general air (environment) to be relatively cold, but also you want it getting colder rather quickly with height. So that when the warm bubble of the thermal is rising and so cooling, it is still warmer than the environment air and so continues to rise quickly. This rate of cooling of the environment air is called the Lapse rate.

When the air is stable, such as on a hot cloudless summer day, the environment air is not cooling with height fast enough (or sometimes not at all) and the thermal bubble rises slowly and not very high. These conditions can be very difficult for glider flights and are hard work, slow grovel and normally also hot and sticky.

The inital task was 3 hour Assigned Area task. At 12:30 the 15 meter class was launched and struggled to stay up. Launch was postpone by 30 minutes and the task was shortened to 2 hour AAT.

We finally launched into the weak conditions and indeed it was a struggle with weak climbs to 4000 feet and big gaggles of gliders, up to 30 gliders in a small area. Whilst waiting for the start gate to open we spotted a few isolated cumuls on track and Gill was calling 5 knots climbs to 6000 feet. Liz and I, together with Kay (Standard class) pushed on to the clouds and were rewarded with good climb now to 7500 feet. Nobody else spotted the clouds and they were all still struggling in the start area in the blue, 3000 feet lower than us. But with the westerly wind the clouds and us were nicely drifting towards the start line.

Finally everyone in our class came over below and were climbing in our cloud. We moved over to the next clouds and waited. Nobody spotted us...

Then we saw the Germans leave, followed shortly by the Czechs (2 gliders are the Germans, 3 are the Czechs..), and then everybody else...we've got them this time!

We waited 5 more minutes then made excellent start and after a very long glide we caught up with the early starters who were now marking climbs for us. The rest of the flight was fantastic with great runs and climbs. I finished 2nd again with 107 kph and Liz 3rd with similiar speed. The only reason we didn't win the day was because we got greedya and went too far in the 2nd area.