Outragous day

Yesterday's weather forecast was for a blue day with weak conditions. It turned out to be a mega racing day and we have achieved amazing speeds in our club gliders. Liz won the day with a whooping 113kph and i'm second with 110kph.

On a cloudless day (blue) you want to start as late as possible because you can use other gliders ahead to mark climbs for you. But on a day with possible showers you generally want to start as early as possible to minimize the chance of getting caught out in a showers (showers tend to develop later on in the day).

So yesterday at 12:30 it was still blue with no sign of cloud but by 12:45 the sky was full of great looking cumulus. After take off while flying around in the start area i noticed the clouds were getting taller very quickly, a sign of possible showers. We had a string of gliders following us around everywhere we went and to try and shake them off we tried a dummy start, went down track for 10km and came back. They all came back with us...

So we then made a proper start straight away which was the decision that won the day. The Czechs and Germans waited too long and got caught out. We had fantastic run all the way, cruising between climbs at 90-95 knots (170-180 kmh) and only stopping to climb 7 times. At one point i took a 10kt climb which is 1000 feet per minute. When you are in a climb like that it feels like you are on an express train to heaven..

The last 50km were tricky, clouds getting massive and we could see showers ahead. We took the last climb very high to have safety margin in case we get caught out in the sink (downdrafts) expected in the shower and got home to find out we romped the 220km task in just under 2 hours..my personal best speed ever in this glider.