Yesterday’s blog entry was headed, ”if only it were always this easy”, and today I can ascertain that this is not the case. We had a 6km exit cylinder around the launch, and there was great cloud suck up until around 5 minutes before the start gate opening – then it died on me, and on lots of other pilots. This proved decisive today, we simply could not get back into the race after being 500m below the more savvy start gaters. This was expensive for myself, for Ronny and for a great many of the ”top” pilots in this comp, but I cannot really tell you who and how much ’cos I was late and chasing all day.
Task was 114 km long, with the first turnpoint being the same as yesterday, Santa Maria, out in the ”flats” around 20 km SE of launch. After that we had to come back over the 3 Kings and Maguey and on to B15 (Mesa de Dolores) NW of launch, from there along the low hills to B41 Elefante (3km cylinder), then back via the Crazy Thermal Mesa to B26 Lapila (this is some 20km S of launch), and back to a goal 1 km around the Cerro Gordo, B48.
Winners are reported to be Yassen (again!) and Chrigel, but I only have that 2nd hand as I sadly wasn’t there to watch the show. As usual it was all about getting the lines right, one particular line comes to mind as I’m writing this: We were coming back from the 3 Kings and gliding towards Sacamacate, and I left with Martin Orlik who was understandably as frustrated as myself at being late and behind. He was a few metres off to my right, yet when we arrived at Sacamacate I had plenty altitude to hunt around for a weak, elusive climb whilst Martin only had altitude to flare his wing! I’d love to be able to truthfully state that this was proof of my wing’s superiority, but sadly it is not so – I just got a better line!
I’m constantly amazed by the low saves people have here. Another pilot on an Axis came in only metres above Martin (was it Wagga??) and hooked a decent thermal back to cloudbase, from literally treetop altitude.
The lift areas were big today, and we all know what that means don’t we? MASSIVE sink in between, worse than any previous day. I had 5.5m/s down for extended periods several times today – that can really rid a bloke of excess altitude in a hurry.
I did the glide into goal with Jeremie, Primoz, Americo and others, and although we were a bit low at Cerro Gordo we arrived at 800m above the landing. Plenty of time to contemplate a day spent catching up, to no avail.
The task was long today, but not very interesting – there really weren’t many route choices to be made, and that is in my view what makes an interesting task. I’m not complaining though, as they have made good tasks on all the other days and it does keep getting harder to think of new things to do now that we’ve had 8 tasks here. Plus I’m well pleased that I have managed to get in every day so far, lets hope that continues.
We had the UP dinner last night, was amazed to see how many we actually are here – I think we were 16-17 people around that table. Torsten supplied a gentleman from Kazakhstan (??) with a reserve wing (sorry I have forgotten your name) and Phil is flying another UP reserve wing, so the table was really full. We didn’t make it into much of a working dinner, but Torsten and I did sort of make the transfer of responsibilities official plus we told a little about the future of comp wing design. I had a great evening, hope the rest did the same.
3 more tasks, nothing is settled yet, but I was rather enjoying my brief spell in the top 15 in this event.
Mads S
