Saturday 11.6.2011 – the competition starts

Competition classes: Standard, 15 & two seaters

It’s amazing how weather can change rapidly here in Finland. In the Grand Prix – during the last week of May – we had just over +10 C and super windy weather. It didn’t take a week for the weather to change into a heat wave. So we all have been confused, as suddenly we had to change our warm clothes to t-shirt and shorts. Well, the weather has been so hot that any clothing is too much – except the bikini of course ;-)

So this Finnish Gliding Nationals has started in really strange weather. We have been used to fairly cold (and unstable) weather during June and our Gliding Nationals. Now it is +29 C warm and sunny, and there are pretty nice cumulus clouds also.

The day started traditionally with raising the flags and short welcome-speeches of competition director Hanski and Riku, who is the general director of Räyskälä Foundation. I am not officially working in the organization, I’m only helping them to get started and I promised to take pictures.

Unfortunately I didn’t see the briefing, since we had to make some last minute settings in the competition office. Launches were anyway supposed to start at 11:30, but those were postponed until 12:45. When we were waiting at runway 08 for the towings to start, the sky was blue, no clouds at all. Anyway all gliders which had gone flying in the morning, managed to stay up. So people felt that towings could have started earlier. Standard class had 401 km and 15m+2 seater class had 416km task, so pilots wanted to leave as early as possible so that they wouldn’t be back so late. There were really nice cumulus clouds when launches started. Finally pilots landed back after 17:00. I had really lazy afternoon during their flight, having lunch, sitting in shadow and of course swimming in the lake.

Kimmo and Arto, the pilots of NIL (daily winner in two-seater class) told me that big part of the task area was blue thermal – no clouds at all. But anyway they could keep up pretty good speed, since their average speed was 112 km/h. On the other classes winners had pretty fast average speeds also, 119 and 120 km/h.