Day 3

We began day 3 of the air race in Elkhart, IN. That proved to be our toughest airport. On our fly-by into Elkhart, the stop watch flew across the cockpit, so we were unable to determine our unofficial ground speed from Carbondale to Elkhart. We spent the night in Elkhart with storms approaching from Chicago with 80 mph winds. We tied Charley down good and she weathered the storm. Were out at the airport by 8am today. The ceilings were low in both Elkhart and Parkersburg, WV, our 7th stop. We decided to wait out the weather and finally departed Elkhart at around 2pm with assurances from the weather briefer that we would have a good tailwind if we left right away. Had a pretty good ground speed into Parkersburg that the weather briefer promised us. We had our second "incident" as we were flying the timing line to depart Elkhart. Just as Marty was on the timing line at 300' AGL, her window came open. She had the airplane at full throttle when it flew open. I screamed at her to keep flying the airplane, and reached around her and closed the window just as we flew over the timing line. We have decided that between the stop watch and the window, we didn't have good luck in Elkhart and would not be stopping there ever again. We got into Parkersburg at around 5:30pm and decided to call it a day. We want to make a grand entrance into Frederick, MD tomorrow. There is supposed to be fog in Parkersburg until around 9am so we are planning to depart around 10. We only have 188nm left to go. Our ground speeds have been pretty good and we only have two legs where our groundspeed was less than our handicap speed. We don't really expect to win the race as first time racers, but we really want to put on a good show. Wish us luck on our last leg tomorrow. Maintenance OK.