Dutch celebrations for Ostrow-world -champion- Sjaak!!!

That’s what it was ALL about!!!!!

On the hottest EVER 13th of October with 28 dgr. C.!!!!!!! Max and Frida picked me up to travel to Venlo for celebrations around and with Sjaak [Selen] who became WGC champion this year in Ostrow in standard class!!
Also the day, that a rare weather phenomena happened ; a hurricane reaching Europe and damaging parts of Portugal and France suffered from terrible flooding.
We got hot air from the devastating Michael ruining parts of Florida.The depression now is nice to us with a week with temperatures between 20 and 28 in October…autumn.

But back to Sjaak and his well deserved special day.
It’s always nice to come back at Venlo where , as you know, my soaring- interest started and my first flight was a fact in 1967.
I straight away walked to the hangar, where “we” had our 3 gliders the Grunau Baby, KA 7 and Rhoenlerche. It looked as if time stood still but,…I heard the old hangar had collapsed under a load of snow damaging trailers caravans AND gliders!! That’s why it looked so fresh and “new”.
So they build a new one and as Venlo and Eindhoven are ONE club now, with a really pleasant atmosphere, they are building another new one at this stage at the opposite side of the old ones.

 

Not all gliders were in, as the weather was so nice that gliders went up, but back in time for the ceremony and party.

 

 

I know the Selen family from long long ago, but did not know that over -grand-dad was a glider pilot as well. I knew Baer and Sjaaks father was involved, as we spoke about it when we met in the past . Interesting as well ALL of them represented Holland at WGC’s.
So pretty normal that both brothers got involved. Not so normal ,….that they both won a world title and Baer even 2 , one in Chateauroux in 1978 in Standard Class and one in Uvalde in 1991 in the same class.That’s a TOP RESULT.
From the 4 WGC titles ever won for Holland, 3 are in the hands of the Selen family. What about that!!!
And when I tell you that Kees Musters when he became WGC champion in Hobbs in New Mexico in 1983 , was a member of the ZES , FLYING AT VENLO, you see that Venlo has some special ingredients to create champions.
And I noticed ,a lot of young ones there, so the future might bring more champions and looks BRIGHT!!!

The Selen family arrived at the airport in a bus with Sjaak and Baer coming out first and of course that huge CUP.

Sjaak repeated a few times; “I  was just lucky”

Club members and club president Yoeri welcoming their guests.

President of the club Yoeri welcomed everybody and the mayor arrived and it was great to hear that he had put some “work”  in his speech ,as it was a good one; well prepared.

   

Both Baer and Sjaak were happy with all what happened and posed for my camera as well.

2 brothers , 3 WGC titles in St. class in 1978, 1991 and 2018!!!!!
With their permission.

One of the presents was a CHAMPIONS-trophy “in blue”. Frauke [IGC member for Holland and working at the KNVvL  office] and Baer started years ago a coaching trajectory for cross country pilots. Baer thought it would be good , to grand winning pilots with a special CHAMPIONSHIP TROPHY, a challenge cup.
It exists now for 13 years and in that time 8 Dutch names were added; 4 European titles, 3 JWGC titles and now 1 WGC title. They never expected that. Not bad for a small country like Holland.
This time it was Baer handing over the challenge trophy to his brother.

The blue trophy and the cup, the WGC medal and a silver award from the Dutch Gliding Association to honor Sjaak.

He got as well a canopy cover in silver with his call sign 2S. And lot’s of flowers specially for partner Liliane ,who shared in all celebrations as his crew, who inspired and helped him. Liliane is in our female team, so  she knows what it is all about.

We also had a very nice 2-course-meal sponsored by Max Verstappen’s JUMBO supermarket. And as one of the speakers mentioned, Max , also from the province Limburg,is not even yet the best of the world, Sjaak is in his discipline and what huge difference in “wages”; too much for the one ,” nothing” for the other……??!!
By the way JUMBO sponsors cycling and speed-skating as well.

Conclusion; a great evening thanks to the combined Venlo- Eindhoven pilots now in ONE name; VEZC [Venlo Eindhoven Zweefvlieg Club] Compliments for all of them!!!!!
Great to see some faces I had not seen for 50 years, awfully nice to catch up with 4 pilots who flew with us in Tocumwal and I had not seen anymore after and sorry I cannot share pictures from all the visitors due to that stupid privacy law.

————

 

—–News from Team Uk.
The British Junior Gliding Team competing next year at the 11th Junior World Gliding Championships (Szeged, Hungary) has been announced!

Congratulations to Simon Brown, Peter Carter, Finn Sleigh and Jake Brattle and to reserve pilots Clement Allen and Henry Inigo-Jones.

We wish them the best of luck with their preparations and busy competition schedule for next year!

I wish them good luck as well.
Picture shared by British Gliding Team

 

———News from overseas destinations;
Bitterwasser shares, as the season has not yet started, a press presentation from the new Audi E tron. Proud that it happens at their Bitterwasser Resort.

As shared by Bitterwasser Lodge & Flying Centre

 

Tocumwal Sportavia shows most of their  fleet as they, Lumpy, started a new commercial  gliding center.

With their message;”Most of the fleet out today, when are you coming to TSC? 
We will be operating 7 days a week from November onwards.”
It’s a rent -out-fleet and the Nimbus 2 is “missing”.
As shared by Tocumwal Soaring Centre

 

AND,…yesterday dark clouds over Tocumwal as you can see on this picture by Donna Boaden.

Courtesy Donna.

This picture shared by Eddie from SportAviation Tocumwal shows why there were dark clouds.

——————

—–News from Matthew and SKYSIGHT;
“We’d like to announce the imminent launch of a substantial refresh of SkySight (try it now at https://beta.skysight.io) – we have been working hard over the year to improve the presentation of our forecast maps.

We are now rendering our plots with vector forecasts rather than raster forecasts, allowing us to show place names, labels and borders on top of the forecasts, helping to orient you better. The interface should be much faster and clearer, especially on mobile and tablet devices.

The efficiency of our new processing pipeline to generate the vectors is such that we hope to be able to increase the detail in our forecasts in some regions, and bring out our forecasts earlier in the morning in others.

Most importantly though, the new system is a better base to build new advanced functionality on top of, and we hope to bring adjustable scales, colours (colour-blind mode!), 3D interactivity and much more in the coming months.

We still have some optimizations to finish and a few bugs to fix before launch, but it will be launching on the main SkySight domain in the coming weeks.

We invite you to try it at https://beta.skysight.io and to please write us feedback at skysight@skysight.io, or via the inbuilt Help functionality.

As shared by Matthew ‘s SkySight

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Not so much soaring-news this week…By the way a great foehn -day last Sunday with strong wave and 994 km in an ASH 26 E starting from Unterwoessen [Germany] , straight S. to the mountains and  991 k. in a Duo Discus XLT from Wiener Neustadt in Austria  is “pretty good ” too!!!!
SO,…CU next week then

cheers Ritz

 

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