The full story

So now that I have everything organised I can finally write up today before I drift off and dream about tomorrow. 

I rolled out of bed early in the morning; not like me at all, I know, but sleeping in a tent will do it. Walked over to a very wet glider, water pooled on every horizontal surface and started getting her ready for the day. 

All sorted and ready to go then off to briefing. I sat up the back with two Danes  not having a clue what anyone was saying. But all that we really needed was "Good Weather" (with a polish accent) and we set off to grid. There seems to be at least 5 operations happening on the airfield simultaneously. Two gliding (a school 

and the club) then the power aircraft, control line aero modeling and winch launching para-gliders! When I was towing the glider to the grid I witnessed my first para winch launch. It wasn't very fast but they sure got some height!  You'll have to wait till Andrew gets here with his good camera to get a picture of that. 

I launched at around 13.20 then came back just under 4 hours later. And that was my day... Ohh you want to know how it was? Yeah, it was pretty good. While on tow it felt like it was very unresponsive to aileron- and they are very small- but in free flight it was fine. The tuggy found me a nice thermal but I thought I'd better hang on a bit longer to get some more height. He then turned back and into it and cored it for me! I thought that was service! I released at 1600" and took that to about 3500" and went exploring. I haven't looked at my trace yet but I recon I ended up doing about 260km. 50k east, then 50k west then 30k east again all in a here and there sort of way just getting a feel for the glider and the area. One big difference here is the bugs! There are billions! And they all want to destroy my lift by sticking themselves along the leading edge. I used the bug wipers three time! And I should have done it again before I landed because it was a pain to clean off by hand.  

That's a bug wiper in action. It winds out on a spool of line with a piece of fishing line running along the wing to remove the bugs. Then reel it in and repeat on the next side. Pretty cool little gadget. 

I was getting normally 3 or 4 knots to 4 and sometimes 5000" and outlandings seam to be mostly into crop. Stubble and fallow paddocks are next to nonexistent.  You don't want to land in corn and you don't want to land in canola and you obviously don't want to land in trees.

So tomorrow I'm hoping for a similar or better day so I can load up the 28 with some water ballast. I drove to the next biggest town this evening, 45km away to get a water meter from the big hardware store. It was a good drive to look at paddocks from the ground and reference that to what I saw from the sky.  This is what I made from my hardware store gatherings. 

And bought more hose fitting and some glider tie-downs 2.0 and the total came to just over AU$50! 

That's all for now