Ted,
in my humble opinion you are doing one of the healthiest things you can
do for yourself for your long term survival as a sailplane pilot. Expose
your mistakes and share them. As a cross over hang glider pilot, I have made
all sorts of small mistakes, I like to think I learned from most of them.
What I am completely convinced of is the need to not evaluate your successes
or failures at this early point in your soaring by the "how high, how far,
how fast" methodology, but instead, to evaluate your process...download your
flights and determine how many of your decisions were ones that could have
had bad conclusions, and then use those as a means to improve your decision
making with each subsequent flight...I generally don't say much here, it's
more fun to simply watch the banter, but on this front I do feel compelled
to suggest that ALL cross country soaring pilots should be trying to share
more of the information we use in our own process. To me, 300 feet is WAY
too low to be trying to climb back up...once in awhile you'll get away with
it...but not every time. And the one time it kills you, the pundits here
will have more fodder for the tireless " Well anyone could see it was gonna
happen sooner or later"'s...My two cents worth ain't worth what it used to
be, but keep sharing those flights...if you aren't sure if it was dumb...ask
somebody.."Hey would YOU have done this..?" and then be prepared for the
outcome.

In this case you got away with something. We've probably ALL gotten away
with something ourselves...but if we share a bit more of what was going
through our head, we can hopefully relegate some of the future visits to
funerals...


Steve
DG-400
4-93