More on the nationals later in this post, let's give a quick update on how our OLC/XC event that ended a little over a week ago went. We had 65+ gliders show up from all over the USA and Canada and wow did we have fun! We flew over 100,000km during the week's time (that is 2.5 times around the world!) and many pilots had their best/longest/furthest flights with many flights over 750km.

We learned a lot over the week and received some great ideas and suggestions from the participants on how to make it even better in the future. We will work hard to make these large events go even smoother, be more fun with less work, have more local and xc instruction, improve the structure of gridding and launching, etc. Thanks everyone for their patience with some of our rough areas. We had 2 tow planes drop out during the event which caused for the need of that patience just mentioned.

We will write more about the event for the SSA magazine but we want to shout from the rooftops that this new OLC/XC camp concept seems to be a very popular format - especially with those who actually experience it. With other threads talking about contest participation dying, we filled up to the max allowable for an SSA sanctioned event and unfortunately had to even turn pilots away. Is this mic on? Is anyone listening?

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Many pilots like the idea of going to an organized event with daily weather briefings, pilot meetings, retrieve office, line crew, airport Notam'd closed, socials and dinners, professional photographers on mountain tops set to take our pictures, etc but they don't want to worry about where they show up on the ongoing score sheet. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of competition with daily awards going on with daily racing tasks and flying for the longest flights. Of course none of this could have been possible without a huge group of volunteers from the Utah Soaring Association and from our amazing CD Ron Gleason.

Don't get me wrong - I personally love soaring contests too! In fact, we are doing one in Nephi in 2 weeks from now just a month after the end of our OLC/XC Camp. Yes we are insane! There is still room left to join us. http://www.ssa.org/MyHome.asp?mbr=7749575376&cid=2268 Why would you want to? To practice for the 2016 15-meter, Open and Standard Class Nationals that were all just awarded to Nephi!

See you in a few weeks,
Bruno Vassel - B4