Perspective

What is it and where do you get it?

Today was like one of those bad movies: The Prom Queen heads for the tool shed where the guy with the hockey mask and the hedge loppers is lurking. “Don’t go there!” The formula is always the same and you can see each bloody murder coming from a mile away.

The first day at every comp always seems to be a mess. Everyone including the organizers is still trying to figure out how things should work. Inevitably there are things that weren’t thought of, and things that were thought of, but don’t quite work as expected.

We were supposed to get waypoints at check-in, but they weren’t ready. The waypoint list was from a comp held here years ago, and there was no altitude data, so they wanted to add that before uploading waypoints. That ended up taking all day, so finally it was decided to upload in the morning before the pilots meeting. In the morning we found that the waypoints had somehow gotten lost transferring between computers, so we would get the old waypoints as they were. That took a couple of hours, and then we were sent out to the airfield. Apparently they wouldn’t choose a task until we were all set up. The staging was organized into three lines. One for odd pilot numbers (the “A” line”), one for even (“B”), and one for pilots with limited tow experience (“C”). The pilot numbers are determined by your cumulative score, and on the first day since there were no scores yet, they use pilot WPRS ranking as the pilot number. Well, since I have no WPRS points, but lots of towing I ended up at the absolute end of the even staging line.

We were set up facing east, as there was a fairly brisk east wind. The limited experience line or “C” line was closest to the airport north boundary fence, the “B” line (the one I was in) next, and the “A” line farthest to the South. Eventually a task was chosen as evidenced by pilots starting to squint at their GPS and push buttons. I left my set-up glider and went looking for the task. It was a 97mile downwind task to the west with no turnpoints and a 15km start circle on the airport. The only problem was that there was no waypoint for the airport, since these waypoints were from a comp held on the other side of town years ago. No problem, I’ll just use distance from launch to figure the start circle. I had a waypoint for the goal, but I had no idea where it was, and now I was in the middle of a dusty paddock with a set-up glider and no way to find it on a map. As I am trying to figure out all of this I notice that the “C” line is moving. They are shifting the whole line to the south and east, since the wind has shifted and is now coming from the northeast. The other two line stay put. “A” and “B” will tow crosswind, and the “C” line will tow at a right angle in front of both of the other lines. Once I figure out where I am going, I start to suit up to go. I turn my glider around and start walking it toward the front of the launch line, but now the wind has shifted some more, so they swing the launch line around a bit, and a bunch of pilots who hadn’t moved into the launch line now move to the new location, and in front of me. This happens three more times, and each time I move further and further back in the launch order. Now our line is towing directly towards the boundary fence with the “A” line towing from behind us to the left and the “C” line towing from behind and to the right. After an hour and a half of this, I am finally on tow. The first two start times have already passed, including the mandatory start for the top 30 pilots. Conditions are weak, and a line of high clouds has moved in from the east, starting to shade things out. There is a huge blue gap to the west, then some pretty good looking clouds further out on course but tantalizingly out of reach. Virtually everyone has already gone, and I found myself sniffing around the airport scratching for ever bit of lift I can find. I eventually clawed my way up to around 2500ft, and a rag-tag gaggle of about half a dozen stragglers forms. Here’s where my latent mediocrity came to the fore. No matter how much I tried to tell myself to just fly my own flight, I kept getting sucked into following one or another glider in obvious poor tactical moves. Finally, I found some reserve of focus, centered a weak climb and topped it out. The others joined me lower, and I waited for them to top out, and then went on glide along course line. No one followed; they all just sat burbling in the top of that climb, presumably watching my progress. Eventually, I found myself low and to the east of a low ridge. I didn’t have enough altitude to safely cross and make it to the next landing fields to the other side, so I hunted around to the east of it, then landed in a field next to the road with another glider. About that time I saw the rest of my gaggle glide overhead after finding a better line than I did. As it was, they all ended up landing just east of the ridge. Total distance: 8.5 miles, about a mile inside the start circle.

The frustration didn’t end there, however. Communication is always an issue when trying to get retrieved, but it seems like there are more than the normal number of issues here. Obviously, with an international group like this there are language issues, but also there are incompatibilities with radios and cell phones. Fortunately I had acquired a radio that could operate on the Australian UHF CB frequencies, so all of our retrieve were on radio. The only reliable cell phone service outside of town here is CDMA – an older format from the US. Most city dwellers and international pilots have the newer GSM phones that are worthless outside of town. Again, fortunately, I had a CDMA phone, but the rest of my team did not. We practiced sending text messages, and that worked between me and two of the phones, including the driver’s. The plan was that we would text in our landing coordinates and our driver would acknowledge receipt, so we knew we would be picked up. I sent the text message as soon as I landed, but got no reply. I tried phoning, but got a “out of service area” message, so I had little confidence that my message got there. Eventually I was able to raise one of my team mates on the phone, and one on the radio. I got word that the driver was on the way, so I settled in to wait. After many phone calls, innumerable radio transmissions, significantly fewer radio receptions, and three hours I was finally picked up. We then picked up our other team mate just down the road. We had all landed within 10 miles of the start. Finally, we could head home! But no! Our Australian team mate decided we needed to stop and visit with the farmer where we had just picked up a pilot. After chatting with a woman in the garden for a good twenty minutes we were finally going to leave, but then her husband showed up, so we had to go through the whole process again. It was about here that my carefully cultivated “go with the flow” philosophy started to back up behind the hairball of my frustration. I wanted nothing more than to just get back in my own space and decompress. It didn’t help that this particular team mate also was unreasonably happy with todays flying, and decided that telling us all about it was the way to lighten the mood. He was particularly nervous about towing, so he was very happy that he took three tows. After each tow, he flew around a bit, then landed and towed again. Of course all I could think about was how long I was sitting there waiting for my one tow while he was having fun! Anyhow, we finally made it back to town - seven hours after I got in line for my 8 mile flight. Back at headquarters we found out that 37 pilots had made goal.

See the results here