The Friday before it all began; Liam was busy doing what a poor student does best... cooking pasta. Meanwhile, Henry was fettling the Junior to fix the radio and provide a PDA for tomorrow's big task.
After an early, wet start on Saturday, the only thing on our minds was the promised Upavon bacon baps!
Briefing was delayed until bacon was consumed, the weather was looking promising and we rigged the Junior (thanks to the small army of helpers getting the wings on).
Henry suffered a hole in his canopy from a trailer door in the wind and his luck didn't get much better, his novice flight was short lived and he wasn't able to start.
Liam, however, completed the task: "As I towed out to the launch point I was a little apprehensive with the howling 20 knot wind... so I decided to get an aero-tow to at-least save me the embarrassment of not getting away, I regretted that decision massively; at least a winch launch would have been over quickly, but instead I had 10 minutes of being dragged through hell.
After release, I turned straight into a nice 5 kt climb up to about 2700 ft QFE, by which point I was massively downwind of the start line and no where near cloud-base... so I checked the PDA and I had gone through the start sector and so decided to not waste time pushing back into wind, and instead kept going, a few km east of the airfield I contacted a 7 kt climb and got up to a base of about 3300 ft. I managed to fly along a street, straight down to the first turn-point, where I found another good climb and then began the next leg. This one was straight into wind for about 50 km. By the time I thermalled to the top over the turn-point, I had been blown about 5 km downwind. The push into wind in the Junior was hard, the streets weren't working consistently and it resulted in getting low as any thermal less than 4 kt resulted in me making negative distance around the task. After that leg I had to head north, which wasn't too much hassle with some good clouds around, but it began to deteriorate on the way home with a few very slow climbs, resulting in me being quite far off course. I managed to get on glide after a few scrappy thermals leading to a solid 7 kt core."
Liam landed back safely on a final glide which squeaked in nicely.
Michael was helpful in his crewing activities, he picked up tons to do with towing, rigging and understanding tasks.
All gliders safely down, we rigged our tent and ran back to the airfield.
Wyvern gliding club always put on an epic BBQ, their scorer was being anti-social and got all our scores sorted for Sunday morning's brief. Unfortunately, Liam had missed the 500 km wide start line by 2 m.
Novice: Upavon - Rivar Hill - Devizes - Avebury - Upavon (75 km)
Intermediate: Upavon - Hungerford - Calne - Wroughton - Upavon (99 km)
Pundit: Upavon - Hungerford - Melksham - Wroughton - Upavon (119 km)
Between the 5 clubs, there were 12 entrants of which 5 completed their tasks.
