Friday 27.11.2015 – 1st Practice day

Today I started writing this “blog” on competition website www.jwgc2015.com. I try to keep this site updated as well. I can’t write so much personal stuff (what I ate etc.) on competition site, but I think I will keep those here.

It’s first official practice day and time to do last tests and then get things going!

I’ve been here for a week now, and the area around the clubhouse and hangars is going through many changes. There’s new lights coming up, new internet connections are built, furniture is brought in, there’s already few food vans, also www.jwgc2015.com website is getting new features. I haven’t done most of those, since the site is handled mostly by Paul Crabb & co. from home…well, not home, but not from here I mean.

I heard today that the grid will always open after the briefing, not earlier. We use a “row grid” here, pilots are placed in rows, and the number of the row will be the same throughout the competition. Place of the row will change, so the same pilots are not starting always first or last.

There was a man putting lights up on light poles and he was using a personnel scissor lift, I got up with it so I could take some photos from high angle. It was bit scary up there, as the lift was shaking a bit when we moved from one corner to other.

It is a flying day

The official part of the morning started 9:30 with mandatory Safety briefing, followed by the normal briefing. Today is our safety officer Lisa’s birthday, so we sang to her and she got a small birthday cake.

Towings started as planned 12:30 and were done just in about an hour. Tasks were traditional speed tasks, about 300 km.

As you might have noticed, the website has now “Stories” block, outlandings list, and links to tracking which have been there couple of days already. SGP guys suggested that we would hide the tracking links when tracking isn’t active, I am still thinking what the best procedures are for us, since if I know myself at all, I will either forget to switch it on…or off, or don’t have time to do that when it should be done. There is still outlandings map, webcams, scoring, and live scoring yet to come.

Swiss team and Canadian team didn’t fly today, they we’re having a rest day instead. Besides, the weather didn’t look that appealing since It was “blue thermals”-day. Of course there was a gaggle above the airfield before the start lines were opened, that usually happens when it’s blue thermal-day.

I met the Media team boss John Styles today as he arrived today, also it started suddenly feel like “good old days” as first I saw Andrew Maddocks and Tracy Scutter, and just shortly after them Tim Kuijpers from Netherlands arrived, he told me that he will be here coaching the Netherlands team.

In the evening we had pork cutlets, salad and potatoes. There will be barbeque every evening at the Clubhouse during the competition, the meal will cost 15$. I can assure you, you won’t leave with empty stomach.