The Regionals are well underway with 3 interesting flying days so far. The first day was forecast to be blue, but with good thermals. It turned out to be rather awful, blue but 2200' was as high as we could go. That meant we could sneeze and suddenly be in 'survivial mode'.
The second day we had a turn point up towards the firth of Thames. Even with a 10km circle around it, it was completely in the sea breeze, and all but Steve landed out or back. Steve got around but because no one else did, it was a zero points day, bad luck for Steve.
Yesterday turned out to be also challenging, but very interesting at the same time. A couple landed out early near the first southern turnpoint, as cloudbase was only 3000' so it was easy to make one mistake and be at 1000', looking for landing spots. As we went north things improved, and there were big convergences we could use to travel up/down the valley.
The top turnpoint for the fast classes was Maramarua which had light thermals and cloudbases of 2000' which made things interesting. There was also some sea breeze, a strong convergence over the swamp, and easterly pouring in. 2 of us in the standard class managed to get around.
A big thanks to David Hurst for his excellent weather forecasts, so far they have been pretty accurate.
Full task details and results are available on Soaring Spot:
http://soaringspot.com/nznr2011/
We'll also try to put short daily news updates on that competition page.
