Day 6

At briefing this morning Grae passed on his heartfelt thanks for those who had sent messages of support. He also displayed a photo of the display at the outskirts of Timaru(where he went to hospital). I will load the photo on to the blog later.

Gavin is back in the task setters seat after a weekend off and Trevor Mollard has done a stirling job negotiating some airspace clearances with the duty controller at Queenstown. Today we will have access up to 11,000ft in the NZA 737/738 which is airspace with lower levels of 8500 and 9500ft to the north and west of Queenstown. Thanks Pete(the controller).

At briefing, the praises of the SPOT system were sung long and loud by the Contest Director who had a worry free evening with the last glider to land yesterday. ZA was the last to land (as it turned out at Morvan Hills airstrip) loseing communications as he got lower, normally there would have been a period of worry until we regained some contact via a landline telephone. The procedure is that if nothing is heard for an hour I would have put up a power aircraft to try to communicate by radio to check that he was OK. With SPOT pinging us every 10 minutes we followed him down and on to the airstrip after landing he left SPOT operating which gave us an exact position on the strip. Whew no more white hairs.....lovely...

Now off to a rebriefing for todays task...