Open flex wing results, Rigid wing results, Sport Class

Blogs from here: Jonny Durand, Jamie Shelden, Tom Lanning, Ben Dunn, and Linda Salamone

8:48 AM: Up to five inches of rain fell last night. We now have lake front property at the flight park. The forecast is for moderate conditions with a north wind turning south by 5 PM. The lift is forecasted to go to 3,600' at 400-500 fpm.

5:04 PM: The winds were light out of the east as we got ready to launch at 1:45 PM. The first start time was 2 PM, but I was the first flex wing pilot to launch. Daniel Spier had just launched in his ATOS. Cloud base was a little less than 2,000'.

I held on to about cloud base as there wasn't any lift at the other end of the runway (we were launching to the east, instead of west). I didn't find any lift up high and had to fly down to 800' to join up with Daniel to start climbing. That lift averages 125 fpm to 1,800'.

It looked like a very weak day, as we expected. The clouds were very diffuse and it had been gray all morning. So we knew before we started that it would be a very slow day.

My "strategy" was to hang with other pilots, but there was only Dan and one other flex wing pilot around. The other flex wing pilots were a few miles behind us as we circled again in light lift 2.5 miles south of the air field.= over Ridgely.

The flex wing pilot headed off before it was time for the second start time and I wanted to wait around in the lift until it was time to head out to get the start clock.

I headed out with Daniel and was down to 1,000' at the edge of the start cylinder as the second start time came around. It was still only Dan and I.

The lift was very weak and we just hung around in anything we could find, below 1,200'. I saw some buzzards getting up to the west, so I jumped over to them as Dan when down the course line.  I joined the birds at 700' and climbed back to 1,600' at 120 fpm.

I will still inside the start circle so I took the third and last start clock at 2:30 PM. I kept going back to the birds to try to get higher, but I could only get to 1,700'. Finally I headed out.

Down to 900' and over a patch of trees, I finally found some good lift. It averaged 280 fpm to 2,300'. Things were looking up. My idea was still to just hold onto anything. I had wanted to hang with other pilots, but so far I had mostly found buzzards to hang out with.

Speaking of birds, I headed south looking for lift and looking for clouds and seeing a large set of chicken sheds with cu's over them.

Arriving at 700' near the chicken coops I worked light lift there for the next twenty six minutes. Finally I was able to get up to 1,400'. Three gliders cam over and landed below me during this effort. One glider, Sunny, came over to me just above me. He followed when I headed east to get over a big brown field under clouds in an attempt to get over the river to our south.

This time I didn't find enough lift to stay up and landed just before the river. Sunny, a hundred feet above me, stayed up and continued to circle slowly being pushed back to the west away from the course line. I saw him for an least half an hour after I landed circling at about the same altitude, 1000'.

I broke down and as we turned around and began to leave the field, there was another pilot just behind us. It turned out to be Jonny Durand, so we picked him up.

When we got home, we found out that Jonny had actually landed in the start circle and this was his second flight and it didn't count.

Dustin landed 2 KM from the goal which was only 24.1 miles out from Ridgely.