Final Day

The winning team - Thermal Underwear. Yesterday's inversion at about 5,600'.

The morning after the last day everyone is packing up and heading out for their long or short drives home. It was a very successful meet and lived up to its name of Team Challenge and reputation of being the best place to learn xc with a bunch of other people and have a great time!

I learned a lot from Mike Barber, Jim Lamb, Dennis Pagen, Terry Presley, Kevin Carter, and all the other great pilots around here. This meet is priceless and I urge any H2 to go out and get their H3 by next year so they can attend this meet. I even had Dennis Pagen measuring my sprogs yesterday!

Yesterday was a tough day for some but I was able to scratch low and got up with a handful of other pilots, and more were able to climb out later on too. I think all the rigids ran the course, I don't think any C's made goal, and I know at least 2 B's made their goal. Our B's and C sunk out and so Eric and I made the first lap to the C goal and back and our other team members still had some time before they'd be ready to setup again. So we headed off again to complete our task with a second lap. We used the clouds down the ridge to get us perpendicular to the waypoint and then ran across the valley to get the waypoint and hit a little climb in the valley on the way back. I really need to get a final glide feature on a vario, because I didn't really know if I could make it back to the lz or not so I took one last climb and made it back. My luck of hitting a climb didn't happen for Eric who left a climb lower than me and that was probably the difference, he said, that he came up a mile short of goal.

I never saw the scores for yesterday and I haven't seen them posted around, but I can say that my team won! Team Ohio came in second after overtaking the E team in the middle of the week. I didn't know if we could pull it out, but I think we managed to win by maybe two hundred or more points. Of course, everyone here will say that's not what it's about, and I agree, but it is nice to win once in a while. The best thing to take away was all the experience and seminars that will hopefully keep us lower air time pilots from having to take the time to figure this out for ourselves. Instead, we are able to come to a meet like this and take advantage of all the great pilots who have so much more experience than us. I look forward to next year!

I'll try to edit together a video soon!