Canadian PG Nats Day 6

A windy day today, and less clouds then yesterday, so we set a task that would get us downwind, but not get us to goal too early (yesterday Bruno made goal too soon, which devalued the day :). Off launch it was really hard to find a thermal and stick with it, since they were leaning way behind launch, and if you fell out too soon you’d be too low to make it back to the ridge.

After we got away from the hill, there was some excitement on launch. A couple of pilots had bad launches, and ended up in the trees to both sides of launch after not making it out. One glider had a tree limb through it, and the entire tree had to come down in order to minimize more damage to the glider.

Just before the start, Will found a thermal out front and the rest of us joined him when it approached the hill, and we all committed to taking it to the top even though it was taking us over the back. When it topped out we went on glide SW towards the first TP (Laroche, about 20 km away). There was a big blue hole to cross, so we topped up again to 1500m ASL, and then made the crossing. But on the other side we were too low to get to the clouds, and the thermals were all blown apart near to the ground, so we all scratched around over downtown Granby until we were forced to land in the Industrial Park.

A bunch of us landed in Granby, and a few people were able to get closer to the TP and then land shortly thereafter. Many people took a line too far downwind of the first TP, and couldn’t get back upwind enough to track SW, and ended up in various places nowhere near the courseline. Martin chose to forget about the comp and just went XC, flying downwind as far as he could, landing past Waterloo.