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This is the Wills Wing Team Pilots competition blog. Here you can keep up with the various members of our team as they progress through the competition season.
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Bit of a Heartbreaker

Aug 14

Written by: Jeff Shapiro
8/14/2009 9:03 PM 

Jeff under the building cu nim at the start


The task committee called for a 160+ kilometer dog leg today, made interesting by the fact that there was significant wind and cloud development at the start of the day. Russell Brown rolled in front of me as I laid in the launch cart dreaming of having a good fly with my friends. It got a bit sporty out of the cart as a thermal ripped off to my right and kicked me way out of wack. I am psyched to have the guys that are towing us up here (Russell Brown, Johnny Thompson and Whiley) because they really know how to use the airplane to straighten us out and keep us in line when turbulence gets the best of us. I saw him turn around in his seat to make sure all was good. I gave him the thumbs up and off we went to a cloud. He dropped me off in lift and up I went right to base. It feels a little like I would imagine a big wave surfer feels when a jet ski pulls him into a big wave. I pulled the release when Russell waved me off and banked it up in 600 fpm. Good times!

I played the start game a bit but in the end, decided to take the first clock with the rest of my team. We were having a little trouble staying out of the cloud we were under as it was towering and approaching cu nim status. I figured overdevelopment was immanent and if we got on course, we would have a good shot at making it furthest toward goal before the day was stopped.

We had a few good glides straight down wind, finding 600 fpm up at each cloud. I saw 71 mph on the ground speed and was stoked that the course seemed to be literally flying by. After one long glide, the cloud cover took over and shade dominated. We all shifted down from high gear to scratching, taking anything over 250 fpm. Our group was strong with Glen, OB, Zippy and Terry Reynnolds. We had managed to get pretty far off course line by staying under clouds and now had to grovel our way back to the turn point.

Jeff and Zippy climbing on course


We did just that. After Glen took another route and Terry went closer to the turn point (he accidentally marked the t-point as a 400 meter cylinder as opposed to the designated 1 k), Jeff, Zippy and I hooked up and made pretty good time toward goal. We were finding 5-600 up and now had a tail wind that seemed to be getting stronger because of a quickly developing cu nim behind us. At 30 k's out we climbed to 9100'. As we were leaving, Jeff wrapped up in something that got him above 10,000'. I thought about staying as I was still in 450 fpm but pushed on with Zipp thinking that we would get the "one more climb that we needed" and that "over 9 grand was high". I flew toward a cloud and was starting to get a bad feeling as my glider began to fall out of the sky. I really hoped that it was just the leading edge of the lift I was to fly into but it wasn't there. The cloud fell apart and I was getting a 4-1 glide. Instincts took over and I was now switching from nervous to desperate. I couldn't believe that after 90 miles of going well, I was now struggling to stay off the ground 4-5 k's out from goal. Zippy was low with me and he said on the radio that he had zero's but that "it wasn't worth coming back for". He was right and I pressed on, hoping for a low save to drift me into goal. He did just that as I landed 2-3 k's short.

After the obligatory tantrum (lots of cussing and pulling my hair out;-), I broke down dissapointed but thrilled to be able to take part in this sport on a day like today. We had unbelievably fast moments, groveling in soft conditions, strategy and risk. I landed short and lost a place in the overall but I learned a lot and felt like we flew well as a team today. We are getting better, more consistent at staying together and becoming more efficient as a group. I said more than once today on the radio "man, I love flying with you guys". Tomorrow is another day.
Cheers

This is a video that I took right after landing short

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