This year 25 club members and 17 aircraft attended the Temora camp over two weeks commencing 29 December. Three club single seaters the LS4, DG300 and the Libelle were flown at the camp. Most days flights of 300 - 400K were achieved. Vaughan Sweeney completed his Silver C and several days later his 300K Gold C triangle, well done Vaughan.
There were several blue days during the first week. On three of the days there was a strong inversion at low down so very little flying was done. There were two good blue thermal days and a couple of good cumulus days. The second week was better with scattered cumulus each day. I attended the camp for twelve days. I really learned allot and enjoyed the company, drinking and the food as well.
Online Contest
I must say how much I am enjoying the OLC this season. Each day on the Temora GCs free wireless internet, you can see what tasks pilots have flown all over NSW (all around the world in fact). It really gives you an appreciation for the weather over the whole of the gliding area. For me it also adds a competitive dimension and gives a purpose to flying each day. As a result I am now keener to fly good triangles or quadrilaterals.
I have talked before about the benefits of having the whole of the gliding world see what we are doing. During our southern summer, the main gliding countries are Namibia, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina. The poor folk in the northern hemisphere can only look at grey skies and wish they were down here flying with us. I am sure that they think that the two biggest clubs in Australia are Cowora and Darling Downs. Most have probably never heard of BSC. There are only a few BSC pilots who have logged flights this season. You can see them at http://www.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0/gliding/getScoring.html?clubId=2645&scoringId=201 Come on all you cross country pilots out there join in and give us a hand.
My best flight of the camp was on the second Fridayin the club LS4 (my syndicate partner George Marbot flew our ASW20). The same day that Tracey flew 750k. I went south to The Rock, turned Cowra, went to near Forbes and turned for Temora. I am very annoyed with myself for only achieving 485k not the intended 500k. As I flew from Cowra to Forbes the clouds started disappearing. So I chickened out and headed for home. If I had my PDA with SeeYou Mobile running, I could have seen that my OLC optimized distance would fall short by a mere 15k. I could have extended towards Forbes just a little way and made the 500k. Oh well, next time I will know better. |
