Here comes the weather

After the regular evening thunderstorm, the morning dawned to be another perfect flying morning. As we drove down to the CLP we looked down onto valleys of mist. On arriving we found that they had organized a couple of practice tasks; a Fly In (FIN) to the CLP and a Judge Declared Goal (JDG).

We still had not received our helium, however the CLP was in a deep creek valley and there was definitely some drainage down the valley. So we headed up the valley past the minimum distance and inflated the balloon on the side of the road.

Camilla, Yosh and I headed back to the CLP to watch the 40 or so balloons make their way down the valley towards the target. The morning was incredibly waffley, with the ground wind changing direction by up to 180 degrees every 5 minutes. We spent about 45 minutes at the target waiting for Sean and watching the various pilots play round in the fickle winds. Having chosen a launch site without any helium was a bit of a gamble and didn’t really pay off for us… but allowed us to learn a lot about how the valley works.

Sean headed down towards the JDG, however aborted the attempt because there was only a few landing spots within the valley due to the excessive amount of corn.

After packing up, we started the usually process of finding some breakfast, sitting in the McDonalds car park where there is wireless internet, buying various bits and pieces in the supermarkets and then heading back to the house for food and a sleep.

The weather forecast had been looking a bit grim and the rain showed its face mid afternoon. We had already decided we were not going to fly, so we headed to the local pub. Over a couple of beers and some dinner (I actually had some fish, which was a nice change from pork), we went through all of the task sheets from the pre-worlds and walked through how we would fly them. David Levin, the competition director, used the full list of task last year… including many combinations of 3D shapes, land runs and CRATs. So if he does the same this year, there should be a lot of interesting tasks to think about.

We have not seen a weather forecast for a couple of days, but the last we saw it was going to be raining until Tuesday… with the temperature dropping from 26 degrees to around 7 degrees. At the moment the rain is not heavy, but the whole area is in cloud so definitely not flyable.