Practice Day and Day 1 update

Hello soaring fans!

Welcome to Pennsylvania’s Kishacoquillas Valley aka the Kish Valley aka the Big Valley. Mifflin County Airport is a half an hour southeast of State College; it is an outstanding contest site mixing large farmlands with the Allegheny ridge system explored and popularized by Karl Striedieck. Mifflin Soaring Society is a small group of very dedicated contest soaring types led by KS and is a well-oiled machine.

Today is Sunday evening so let’s catch up. Paring down the “no shows”, we’re at 28 entrants. Practice day weather was forecasted to be a short day so a “just make sure everything works” task was called. A TAT with two turnpoints each having 20-mile radii with a nominal distance of 135 miles worked well. Good job Sean Murphy who delivered 111.10 distance @ 55.69 mph. Points were devalued and at least a third of the field stayed in the box.

Sunday dawned with doubt … and continued. Forecast showed a large storm line coming through from the southwest. Decisions, decisions … just bail out and race to the box or risk getting caught in a passage. Opinions varied (imagine that) but the earlies predicted washout between 2:00 to 3:00 and the optimists said 4:00 to 5:00. Being the first day of a ten-day contest, the risk just did not seem reasonable and the day was canceled at 11:00. Two choose to funfly … they did not make it one hour as it was serious OD and rain before 1:30.

Please stay tuned.

Marshall McClung