Sart of the Serbian Nationals in Zrenjanin

Well, it's been four days since my last post, so there's a bit of news to report.

Saturday, July 5
As per the agreement from the night before with Rica, we arrived at Novi Sad airport at Cenej around 9 am to get everything organized. We got the gliders out of the hangar, washed and cleaned them and prepared the parachutes, batteries, paperwork, etc...
There will be four of us from Novi Sad competing in the nationals: Rica (Vlatko Rihter) flying Standard Cirrus, Fica (Ivan Filko) on Standard Cirrus, Uros Bobic on Vuk-T and yours truly on DG-101G. Actually, Uros will not be competing, due to his lack of experience, but will be flying with the rest of us, which should be a great learning experience for him.
The day started with a low overcast, but the sky started clearing around noon, soon followed by a bunch of nice looking Cumulus clouds popping up everywhere around. Rica and Fica had their gliders packed in trailers and car-towed them to the Ecka airport just south of Zrenjanin, about an hour's ride from Cenej. Uros and I were to fly over in air tow. Uros first did a 5 minute circuit on his Vuk-t, his first flight on the type.
I took off and released at 700 meters near Zabalj, about one-third of the way to Ecka. The weather was decent, and I used it to get re-familiarized with the DG-101. The last time I flew it was in 1996, but it didn't take too long for the feeling of familiarity to return. This bird still flies as well as ever and I had a lot of fun putting it through the paces for about an hour and a half, before finally landing on the taxiway of the Ecka airport.
Uros had a bit of bad luck - he released prematurely and had to land out in only his second flight on Vuk-T. Fortunately, the out landing went without a hitch and he made it to Ecka in pieces.
The list of competitors includes 2 teams from Slovenia and 10 from Serbia, plus Uros. Out of 10 of us competing for the Serbian championship, four came from far away: Miro from Australia, Zoki from India, Brane from Korea and yours truly from Canada.

Sunday, July 6

Today was a practice day. The first order of business was the briefing at 10 am, followed by a short opening ceremony. Mita, the judge, set a 310 km task, however, most of us still had to do some more prep work on our gliders and decided to either stay on the ground or do shorter flights.

The weather turned out to be great, exactly as forecast (2/8 Cu's with the bases at 2000 m AGL with 2-3 m/s thermals), so I decided to fly. I took off just after 2 pm and flew to Senta and back, about 120 km in total. As it turned out, my radio transmission quit before take off (a soldered connection for the microphone wire broke) and I forgot to connect the antenna to my GPS logger, so it was good that the day didn't count. After landing I fixed the radio and changed the tape on the ailerons and the elevator - courtesy of Miro who brought some high quality tape from Australia.

Monday, July 7

Monday was supposed to be day 1 of the competition. The weather forecast, however, was inconclusive with pre-frontal situation and warm air mass moving in from South West. One of my duties is to check the weather charts and satellite images every morning and advise Mita, the task setter and the chief referee, as to the weather forecast for the day. On a regular day this has become a routine task, but today was quite complicated. Anyway, the task was set - 2 hour assigned area speed task - and we took the gliders to the start grid for the first time.
As the temperature reached 32 deg C, Bugar the flight director decided to send one glider up to check the conditions, which from the ground didn't look too promising. Dragan (Kawasaki) took off, but found only some broken up lift and was back on the ground 15 minutes later. At that point, the day was cancelled and the gliders returned to the hangar.
Igor, the member of the referee team and the resident IT wizard, set up a Web page for the competition on the Soaring Spot Website, where all the results will be published. The URL is: http://www.soaringspot.com/odjpsz2008/

In the evening I drove back to Novi Sad and had a great big supper with my cousin Bojan at my aunt and uncle's place. My aunt Olga is a great cook and she made it her mission to make sure that I am well fed. Mission accomplished for the day! In the evening I went to Strand, the local beach on the Danube, with Bojan, Nena and Aleksa. At 10 pm it was still close to 30 deg C. The cold front was definitely approaching.

Tuesday, July 8

Got up early and showed up at Bojan's door at 6 am for our morning coffee. Sasa had one of her 24 hour shifts at the hospital, so it was only Bojan and I. I checked the weather info on the Internet and it looked iffy for flying today. Phoned Mita at 7 and agreed with him that it's a definite maybe for today. Left Novi Sad at 7:30 for a leisurely hour drive to Ecka.

The Toyota Avensis, which I rented in Frankfurt, burned 5.1 liters of gas per 100 km cruising at 90 km/h, which is good considering that the price of gas here in Serbia is 100 Dinars (about $2.20) per liter. To make things worse, the average salary in Serbia is around 30,000 Dinars ($600) per month. How most people here make ends meet is a mystery.

As expected, the weather in Ecka was overcast, so the day was officially cancelled around 11 am.Instead, we had a joke telling session, with most jokes being told by Brane, Miro and Paponja, the tow plane pilot from Novi Sad who did his basic glider training with me at Cenej back in 1976. Next it was Preferans (a very popular local card game) for Ziva, Mita and Rica and catching up on computer work for me, including the Blog update.

The forecast for tomorrow looks good and everyone here is looking forward to finally doing some real racing. For the rest of the day I am planning to check the company email, phone into the projects meeting and then install the PDA cradle and fix the glider canopy cover.