The final day was just short of a 400km racing task. As they say in auto racing it’s often hard to take your foot off the gas and not push 100%, and it throws off your rhythm. This was probably a little true. I took a little extra height in most climbs, especially my final glide climb, which I went to +1500 ft., and this cost me slightly in speed today as we all know it does. But in my defense I was trying to protect against weak spots ahead of which there were several today costing a few some serious points. It was awkward but I got the job done. Again never really getting critically low (my theme for the contest) and keeping the flight low stress.
I certainly could have pushed much harder, and it was nice to have some lead to expend. That said it’s never fully comfortably and my closest competition definitely made a push and gained a few points, certainly more than I would have hoped. But, at the end of the day, we got the job done and the future looks bright for team 7T.
Huge thanks to the organization here at Uvalde led by Mark Huffstutler. Mark is the man here in Uvalde and without his passion there would be no major event soaring here in Uvalde. He has run two world championships here (1991 and 2012) and is running what will likely be his last next summer (2024). A Herculean effort. Thank you Mark!
Running any major soaring contest requires an incredible effort from a huge amount of people who literally give up two weeks (minimum) of vacation to work hard in numerous contest support rolls. Sherman Griffith was our Contest Manager, responsible for operations and did a fantastic job. This was a safe, accident and incident free contest!
Ron Gleason from Utah was the scorer. He managed both winscore for the official SSA scoring and SeeYou and SoaringSpot.com in parallel in preparation for the 2024 FAI World Soaring Championship Uvalde USA next summer. Scoring is a very time consuming role and Ron was up in the early am and late in the evening checking logs and managing penalties. Huge thanks Ron.
Rich Owen was here flying with Pete Alexander in the 20m and spent an extraordinary amount of time throughout the entire event putting together daily and sometimes twice daily contest reports that were highly entertaining and incredibly complete with info from the days winners on how each task unfolded. He really works hard on those reports and I (and all the competition pilots, their families, friends and the sport as a whole) are all incredibly appreciative of the work Rich puts into helping the soaring community share in our event. Rich does this at every contest he attends and has been doing this for the last four or five years. That is enormous dedication. Thank you VERY MUCH Rich!!!
The rest of the volunteers are too numerous to name. Tow pilots and clubs who sent their tow planes. Line crew, social crew, registration, and dozens of other folks who donated their time to help put in a fantastic event. THANK YOU ALL!
To the other pilots and teams, this was an awesome contest flown at a really high level. It was extremely competitive. We are ALL continuing to improve and the level is getting extremely high! It was an extraordinary pleasure flying with each and all of you!
Finally, huge thanks to Tiffany and Vaughn for their time, their love and their patience with me!
Sean
7T – ASG29
