Lots of pilots who were a bit starved for air time headed up Sugar (and perhaps other launches) for a bit of flying before the meet. O'Brien and I had plenty of air time so we chose to stay on the ground. Turns out only Zippy flew as it was blowing hard over the back and he took off in a cycle up the south facing front.

Registration was a breeze with lots and lots of little goodies for the pilots including a signal mirror, water bottle, maps, sun glasses visor clip, coupons for ice cream and a swim, croakies, tour maps, CD of the Lakeview flying sites from the Chamber of Commerce, laminated name tags for the pilot and glider bag, and tickets to the potato and margarita opening "dinner" and closing dinner. The cost to pilots for their drivers for these affairs is also quite cheap.

Greg Babush is doing the scoring and is using FS (alright). Looks like he has it all under control. My only complaint there is that the waypoints on the web site were added to and the web site was not updated (trailer was stolen a few weeks before the meet, so things were disordered), so I had to reload all the waypoints. This would not be so bad, but I had converted the waypoints from the web site to the GDB format to allow me to use MapSource to upload the waypoints to the NUVI. GPSBabel often does a poor job with the conversions missing the west indicator and not putting a minus sign in front of the longitude value when required. This puts all the waypoints 5000 km away.

Also GPSBabel and GPSDump (which also does conversion and doesn't miss the west indicator) use the CODE instead of the NAME to name the waypoints and this can lead to confusion if there were names in the NUVI that are different than the names in the 6030 and the Garmin III. So I had to actually edit the GPX file (the universal waypoint XML format) that I created with GPSDump, to change <cmt> to <name> and vice versa, before I could get a proper file to convert (using GPSBabel) to the GDB format for MapSource.

I'm very versed in this waypoint conversion stuff, so you wonder how a regular pilot is supposed to stick the waypoints into their driver's NUVI.

The rules here are a little arcane (probably because they are stuck in paraglider time). Minimum distance if you leave the start circle early, as bad a penalty as we had at the Worlds in 2007 (thanks to CIVL). Unclear in the rules (open to interpretation) what happens if you wipe out some of the first part of your track log (GPS set to wrap). In Big Spring I just gave the pilot the first start time. Easy enough, no need to even bother them about the issue.

Stopping a task stops it at the stop time (not 15 minutes before). No minimum time in the air after the first start time (it was an hour in Big Spring, two hours at the pre-Worlds in France). But 30% of the pilots have to fly more than the minimum distance. At least there isn't a requirement that there be some one in goal.

Clouds came in from the south late in the evening.