New Castle, VA Region 4 South Day 4 of 6 Report

Today started with the usual cannon blast, amidst excellent omelets
served at the towplane tavern, followed by the winners speech from
yesterdays flight. Tim Welles W3 won the 18M and Evan Ludeman won the
combined 15M class. Alot of pilots were talking about Evan Ludeman's
flight in his ASW-20, which is the second lowest performing glider at
the contest. Evan's non-handicapped speed beat everyone in 18M and
all but one in the FAI class. His main strategy was him betting on a
slightly slower inter thermal speed to reduce his percent circling,
which he said paid off dividends with a 61.46 mph speed around the
course.

Today's forecast was a promising forecast which came true too late in
the day as unforecasted cirrus clouds moved in overhead. The 18M
class was launched and struggled with low cloudbases. Paul Cordell
decided to hold the launch of the FAI class with the cloudbases of
just below 3500 AGL with broken, slow thermals. Since the landable
fields in this region are spaced out a little more, a higher cloudbase
is necessary for safety. Everyone waited patiently to see if things
would improve in time for a suitable task, but the clock ran out and
the day was cancelled.

Many took tows anyways, some to only land back within 20 minutes, some
scratched for a couple hours just locally and the legends managed to
go fly the entire course!

Despite the cancellation of the race, it was still great to hear the
roar of the towplanes engines echo through the valley. Premier
mexican food laid out on a 25 foot long buffet table hit a homerun for
the nights dinner. And the bonfire live music was enjoyed by
everyone.

Friday and Saturday's forecast still optimistically shows flying both
days with a fair chance of more racing.

In article
,
Scott Alexander wrote:

Today started with the usual cannon blast, amidst excellent omelets
served at the towplane tavern, followed by the winners speech from
yesterday\



Thanks for the reports Scott. Wish we were there.

Thanks to Frank for his reports as well.