Well, it's all over again. Somehow we managed to fly 11 days of 12.
Day 8 was good, with a tricky part up north. Doug and I ended up landing out while eveyone else made it home. I was in an airstrip, but forgot the golden rule of "the bin marks the top of the strip" and ended up landing a slight downhill. We managed to stop the glider before the end of the strip by putting a wing down and skidding to a halt, which I was very pleased about because it really was a big drop.
As I put the glider in the trailer I realised the wing had scrapped over something in the field, and caused a big scratch. That night we had the glider checked by engineers for a heavy landing check and confirm the scratch was OK to fly when tapped up. It'll be up to be fixed this week.
The lesson is always land up to the bin when landing at a strip. I wrongly assumemd the strip went up the same as the rest of the hills, but it was actually the other way around. Luckily it was flat top and bottom, just the middle had a slope, and without any flat references I didn't even realise until I was stopped at the bottom.
Day 9 was a tricky day, but somehow I had more trouble than most. I made several attempts to leave the Mangakino region without luck. The task took 4 hours 20, compared to most others 2 to 3 hours.
A standing ovation when I arrived home was nice at 6pm, as everyone was expecting a landout.
Day 10 was a good day. Nice and fast, good cloud bases, and we flew out east over the forests and farmland.
Day 11 was very tricky. A strong south easterly put the airfield in the lee of Tahara. A lot of pilots including myself never got started, or gave up soon after starting. A couple managed to find the wave off Tahara and started the task at 6500 feet which was impressive.
Special congratulations to Bob for being the only person, out of both classes, to make it back home to win the day. Very impressive!
I went to retreive Fin, which turned out to be quite a trip, leaving at 5, arriving back at 10pm. The tradition of people landing out a long way away on the last day continues!
Day by day places:
http://www.soaringspot.com/nzclub2013/results/club/day-by-day.html
Final scores:
http://www.soaringspot.com/nzclub2013/results/club/total/day11.html
Congrats to Steve Wallace, Mike Stathern and Mark Wilson, for 1st, 2nd and 3rd.
For the Matamata Soaring Contest, here are the day by day results:
http://www.soaringspot.com/msc2013/results/open/day-by-day.html
Congratulations to Pat, Tony and Trevor!
