Day 2

We had some conflict in the forecasts Saturday morning. SkySight did not look great at all. Our local weather support from Penn State, John Bird and Phil Chidekel, with support from remote weather wizard Walt Rogers, talked about a "squelch line" that should move through with good soaring behind. This would be the remnants of some overnight storms out by Dodge City. 

In contrast our morning towplane sounding put the temperature at 6000 ft as 58F. This was two defrees cooler than the day before. Trigger was 78 and the forecast high in the mid 80's so we had a nice pad. "Warm Advection" was also mentioned as a concern which could tamp things down.

With all this in mind we called a 2 hr close in MAT with 5 or 6 Turnpoints and a backup 2 hr TAT if things looked a little better. Cu started popping at noon which was unexpected and the sniffer was up at 12:30 and climbing. Launch started shortly after that.

With a look at the satellite photo and the early start we switched to a 3 hr TAT out to Pratt Great Bend and Stafford. This would get us in the cloud field and able to work the wind line.

We had a short blue hole to cross to get to Pratt but the crowd made it across without much trouble. The clouds in the Pratt and great Bend areas were great, but when we turned back into the wind we had to go back into the blue to get to the Stafford area. This clearly caused trouble for the lower performance gliders especially.

Four gliders including me landed in the vicinity of St John, KS. Three landed at the Stafford airport, two at the Roberts ag strip and one landed out between there and Sunflower. All of these are along Highway 50 so there was quite the parade of trailers up and down that corridor late in the day. We had 6 or 7 finishers with Mike Westbrook winning the day. He Buried the Great Bend turnpoint which most people thought at the time was not optimal strategy. Obviously we need to be taking notes.

Mike wasn't planning to fly the whole contest as he plans to attend Pre World's in France later this summer. However considering he's in the lead here he's found a little extra vacation time to stay to the end. 

Today is storming so no flying expected. Tomorrow and Wedensday look good, Tuesday maybe. See you later!