So, today being the 25th we finally got the first task off our minds, and what a task it was. We’ve cleverly managed to put Ronny on the task committee, he’s likely to be one of the foreigners who knows this place best, and he’s always good for a dose of reason when everybody else goes down a path of excessive bureaucracy and schnitzelführer’ing.
Today Ronny managed to persuade the powers that be that the ordered launch hasn’t really been necesarry in all the years they have run the Monarca event, in spite of the number of participants being the same. From the beginning the intention has been to let the top ranked pilots launch whenever they wanted to, and on this first day the rankings would be decided by WPRS, however with 75 minutes from Window Open till start gate open reason prevailed and the first 15 minutes were made into ”open for all”. This pleased me no end since it allowed me the opportunity to launch first, as I always try to do, and the air immediately dispelled all nerves, as it always does.
Task was a bit of an X, 74.5km of here and there (the locals will know all the names – I don’t, hardly ever flew here before), with a 400m virtual goal cylinder around the Torre launch above Valle de Bravo, and landing down at the official landing field.
Conditions where I was were rough, with relatively strong turbulence if not very strong lift, but others reported good climbs and I have heard rumours of more than 120 pilots in goal, can’t beat that for getting the whole thing off the ground; lots of smiling faces both on launch, in the air (I think) and in the landing field.
We had an exit cylinder start and to me it looked like almost the entire field timed it well enough. Then we went west back to what I believe they call ”crazy thermal”, and from then on over a valley towards the 3 kings and along a forested ridge all the way to the antenna at the end. Ronny had told me that this ridge is like Bassano so I just went for it, never turning once, but in the end it didn’t make much of a difference because the people who thermalled (and most people did, along the way) could push more speed and we all arrived at the first turnpoint around the same time anyway – I bet those who flew higher had a less stressful time of it than me, down in the trees and the wind. From the antenna we went into some flatter country, with some speeding right across to the turnpoint and arriving low but getting good climbs there, and others thermalling a few times on the way, arriving slightly later but higher, and again it didn’t seem to matter so much what you did. There were good climbs at the turnpoint, and then it was time to make the first real route decision of the task. We could either go slightly left from the course line, back onto the 3 kings and over the high plateau from there, or we could go slightly right and hit the area around launch and cross the plateau from there. This time it made a difference as there was good cloud development on the latter route, something I cleverly ignored and paid for with quite some minutes of circling in weak, wind-broken stuff. The last bit of the leg towards the 3rd turnpoint was very shady, but fortunately a convergence sets up in this area and this kept most of us off the deck in spite of very little altitude to play with.
After the 3rd turnpoint it was 180 degrees back the way we came, all over some pretty high ground, and around 10km into the hills just SW of Valle proper, then a quick glide over the end of the lake and into goal.
There’s no official score up yet but I have heard that Eric Reed won the day, with Ari-Pekka Sahlström from Finland in 3rd, but that is about all I know right now. I feel good about having predicted that the US team would be right there in the rankings here, but then again I managed to mention so many in my ramble of a few days ago so it is hardly surprising that I’m getting some of it right…
I really do need to sleep now, am still on European time so my internal clock is insisting that it is almost 5AM now, and the eyes just won’t stay open.
As for team UP I think Torsten and Primoz had a decent day, both their wings are going well and Primoz is attracting lots of attention because of his unusual wing tips. My own wing is also going really well, a bit hard to thermal efficiently but it glides well and is remarkably stable in the almost omnipresent rough stuff. The guys and girls on standard Edges are well pleased with the ease of use of their wings, so all in all I’m happy with what I hear.
More tomorrow,
Mads S”
