Thursday 26.11.2015 – Strong winds

The day was very windy from the beginning, or from the night actually. I was awake at night between 3 and 5 (yep, didn’t sleep that well) and the noises coming from outside sounded like it would be raining. It was only windy, nothing else.

We saw Jenny’s (our meteorologist) weather forecast and maps at the briefing. There was a large high cloud area south from us. Hmm…perhaps the “Gods of Weather” had finally heard that there is a gliding competition about to start at Narromine and they had to send some bad weather over us.

Anyway the weather during the day was quite peculiar, temperature wasn’t that hot or cold, but wind was getting stronger and stronger. Because of the sunshine and the temperature, it didn’t feel like a storm, but it would have felt like that if it would have been night or raining.

There were A and B tasks, but eventually day was cancelled. A tasks were normal speed tasks and B tasks AAT tasks which is quite usual in unsure weather conditions.

While I started cleaning the “press room” at briefing hangar, Ailsa and Australian team with French team were preparing for a water slide. What is a water slide? You put a big (plastic) banner on a lawn, put lots of water on it and some dish washing liquid, then remove the excess clothes, take a short run and slide over the wet and slippery banner. This works best in temperatures were your clothes would dry in 30 seconds or so.

But it looked like the banner should have been much longer, as the French team made pretty fast slides which would have lasted longer. There was a tree at the end of the slide, so if you would be sliding in pairs, other one would hit the tree if the speed was too fast. It looked like fun anyway, but I think I would have hurt myself if I would have done those acrobatic moves what the Frenchies did.

I assumed nobody went to fly, the tie down area looked like all planes were securely tied down to the Earth. That was good because of the wind. But I saw one glider in an aerotow, but never heard who it was.

I left the airfield around 17.00, and tried to ask what teams are doing tonight. Adam had told me that USA was having Thanks Giving dinner, Australians had their team BBQ, but others disappeared before I could ask anything. I had a shower and rested for a while.

The plan was to have some Chinese at Narromine, which we did with Wojtek and Pete “the Pirate”, I mean the tug pilot. Finally I got food with chili on it :-)

Finnish team

Ahh, I almost forgot: the “Finnish team” is now complete. Here is the flying team: Petri is the pilot and his father Martti or “Masa” is the Team Captain and Petri’s mum Liisa is the crew :-) Then there is Wille and Wellu, who are volunteers at the organization. Or Wellu and Wille, as Wellu is the big brother. They are identical twins from Räyskälä.  Wille was working at the WGC2014 in Räyskälä, they both have lots of experience from competitions held in Räyskälä.

So if you are here and feel like seeing people in double, it doesn’t mean that you’ve drank too much, it means that you’ve met our twins, which we all call as “WilleWellu”. Wille is the one with beard and Wellu without, unless they decide to change it, then you might be in trouble.