Day 2

Thursday, July 10

Thursday morning we woke up to overcast skies, looking anything but promising. The Internet weather charts and satellite photos showed the whole of Western and central Europe under a cloud cover. However, the radio forecast was calling for sunny skies later on and temperatures up to 30 C. Around 11 AM it started clearing a bit, so the judges declared a 3 hour pilot selected distance task.

The take-off started at 1 PM, still under a mostly overcast sky.

Once in the air, the conditions seemed to be improving, and we climbed up to 1500 meters AGL (Above Ground) and immediately set off on the task.
The first (and the only mandatory) turn point was Novi Becej. I flew together with LS-8 EJ (Ziva), Discus 2 ZF (Zoki) and LS-7 BB (Brane). We made it to the turn point in good time, flying under a bunch of Cu-s. My DG-101 without water (I didn't bother filling the tanks because it looked like a waste of time) couldn't keep up in cruise, but I seemed to make up most of what I lost in the thermals.

After rounding the first turn point, we headed due West towards Srbobran. The conditions en route were getting weaker, and we struggled a bit. I stayed with EJ and ZF, but by now they were some 300 meters higher. After rounding the second TP, they went further West to Crvenka, but I decided to head North towards Novi Zednik. That proved to be a pretty good decision, as the lif improved, back to about 1.5 to 2 m/s average, up to 1600 m AGL.
After that, it was smooth sailing. I rounded the third TP and headed back towards Novi Becej under a bunch of nice looking Cu's. Looks like the good luck charm that David made for me was making a difference. I have it pasted on top of the radio, just left of the altimeter (see if you can find it on the photo below)

After Novi Becej, I continued straight towards Sutjeska. The Cu's held until about Zrenjanin, after which there was a pretty big blue hole. I got up to 1400 m and headed into the blue. I rounded the TP at 700 and turned back towards the airport, having enough for a comfortable final glide.

According to the navigation computer (an IPAQ PDA running SeeYou, connected to a Colibri GPS logger), I was going to be back about 10 minutes early, meaning that I would lose about 15 km of distance. Luckily, at 400 meters I found a weak thermal and climbed to 600. This enabled me to fly a few km past the airport to get more distance, and then return safely for landing, still a couple of minutes short of 3 hours.

Fica (77) won the day with me coming in as a close second. With that, I stayed on top of the leader board. The complete results are on http://www.soaringspot.com/odjpsz2008/results/standard/daily/day2.html