The last few days have had some lows, highs, land outs and International night.  Friday, Saturday and Sunday all started promising some great soaring.  Sunday turned out to be the best so far.  With the promise of good conditions the organizers announced grid times earlier and earlier each day, but would be forced to wait later and later each day for launch as the forecast conditions took their time in developing.  The late launch and subsequent starts ended in landing out the entire Club Class and half of Standard Class.  Tough day.

Sunday promising the best conditions to date just didn’t materialize as the classes started and moved out on task.  Walt Rogers has been sending his analysis of the weather for the Montlucon area every morning.  His synopsis have been excellent and highly accurate.  Our pilots see Walt’s detail analysis from Topmeteo , Skysight and other sources and go to the Pilots meeting well briefed.  This allows them to concentrate on tactics

International night started well.  All countries were offering a variety of traditional food.  Notable mentions are the Danish Team had Hot Dog/Sausages that would rival a Baseball Park Hotdog. The French had all sorts of cheese, pate and of course wine.  Spain had paella.  Almost everyone had beer.  We Americans offered Red white and blue fruit salad (Blueberries, watermelon, banana) S’mores and JD and Coke.  There was a long line of kids for the S’mores. All cookies and marshmallows were gone, but we had one chocolate bar left.

The highlight of the evening was meeting people were have only read about, hanger talk and the those stories of  “there I was out of altitude and ideas and here is what I did”.

Today was a rest day assumingly because of International Night recovery period and the rain that was present most of the day until about 5PM.  Well deserved rest so we can go do it again tomorrow.

Colin Mead

Team Captain