A strange day today, with lots of struggle & outlandings, along with some very good US Team results.

The forecast was for an unstable airmass, cool post-frontal temperatures and plenty of fairly low cloud, increasing during the day.  The Windy.com website (whose short- and medium-term forecasts have been good here) called for 74% cloud cover until noon, then increasing to 96% by 14:00 and 99% by 16:00: seemingly a clear message that motorless flight would be hopeless.  The optimistic view was that it might stay marginally soarable until 18:00.

The launch was delayed a bit, but once underway pilots had little trouble finding lift.  The forecast of a day ending early did away with the usual reluctance to start – almost all pilots were away promptly.  They soon found that – at least in some areas – the unstable air needed very little solar heating to yield usable lift.  But the northwest wind was strong enough to be troublesome, especially for task legs headed west.  Early speeds were looking insufficient to produce finishers, and the prediction of increasing overcast was proving correct.

But somehow it was possible for many pilots to make a lot of distance in a sky awfully close to a solid overcast.  Prominent among them was Daniel Sazhin, who separated himself from a struggling gaggle near the first Club class turnpoint, found good conditions on a long leg headed north, got through an area that almost all his competitors found desperately difficult when headed south, and returned home to take first for the day – one of just two finishers.  Such is the scoring here that his speed advantage over 2nd place, which on a day with lots of finishers would have earned a score advantage of around 140 points, was on this day worth just 5.  But simply to complete a task that so many excellent pilots could not is a notable achievement.

15-Meter class, had 9 finishers, and Tim Taylor was among them – in second place, beaten only by Sebastian Kawa (who, unsurprisingly, took advantage of a tough day to jump back into first place overall).  Tim was consistent throughout the flight and thus stayed ahead of the difficult and deteriorating conditions that steadily claimed slower pilots.

Standard class had 19 finishers.  Our pilots did not claim any podium spots, but nonetheless got home, prevailing over conditions that any experienced observer would rate as grim to hopeless.  Tom managed to stay in touch with a good gaggle (as smart pilots aim to do in such conditions), but with those pilots endured a long struggle to find the last climb necessary to finish.  Sarah was some 15 minutes behind, and at 19:00 – long after the day was predicted to be dead – no view of the sky or her altitude & position offered even the smallest reason for optimism.  With her trailer on the road headed to the general area where she must now surely land, she somehow found the climb she needed and became the final finisher, just a few minutes behind the others.