On Monday, January 29, 2018 at 7:10:52 AM UTC-7, wrote:
A few years back, I was turning final for a land-out at Swee****er strip (45 miles south of Minden). At 300 feet I hit a large bump and thought about trying one turn in it to see if I could climb, but declined because my hard deck was 500 feet. I landed, called in, then I watched another sailplane hit the same bump, but he turned in it, climbed away and made it home. Should he be penalized? Maybe he had more experience than I had. Maybe he knew that when a west wind blew, it went around mount Patterson and then met again on the east side.......right where my big bump was found. We can't legislate judgement or experience!
JJ..............PS, I'm old enough to remember when the national rules were only 2 pages!

I very much agree with you, JJ. A lot of what is magical about soaring and glider racing is the element of self-determination, operating independent of authorities and deciding your own fate. Towards that, I want to give up no airspace and I do not want any more cumbersome rules and restrictions. I want the liberty to make all of my own choices as I deem best for me. It's for those reasons that I opposed the original incarnation of hard deck.

Yet it is truly painfully for all of us that we are suffering too many serious accidents. It would seem that there is an opportunity to significantly reduce one of the several categories of accidents and give up almost nothing in terms of flying liberty. My proposition is that giving up only the altitude below 300 ft in the flats really is giving up almost nothing. If you might have glossed through my alternative hard deck proposal of yesterday afternoon, take a look at that as a separate consideration please. I know that it can only help the overall accident problem a wee bit -- perhaps it's just one guy every ten years that might be saved from his own temptation. Maybe he's worth saving if we can do it with no new rules and no new complications to how we fly contests?