The smell of dope in the morning.
Or, as it were, in the evening…Am writing this out on the little terrace in front of our team apartment. On the terrace below is the landlord and his police-officer friend, sharing a doobie, and the smell is pleasantly wafting up my way so I can pretend that this, and not flying fatigue, is the cause of my dizzyness!
Today’s task was a record 114km long, and since one can’t just fly straight lines here we flew WAY longer than that. I’ve had upwards of five hours in the air, and the thermal activity was shutting down good before we finally made it across the 1km virtual goal cylinder.
There was more Cu development today, and with around 50-60 pilots in goal I guess we have to admit that the task setters got it all right again. The flying was super pleasant, with proper thermals, relatively calm glides and many options in terms of route choices. We started with a 6km exit cylinder around launch at 1245, moved SW towards Lapila, then back to a little knob behind Valle proper (Elefante), over to El Penon, from there SE (I think) to Tezca, back in front of launch and Le Penon to Escalera and then into goal at G03.
As has happened the other days pilots were taking turns pushing out in front so the pace is brisk, and to my pleasure I’m seeing even pilots in the top 10 pushing hard – you guys rock. I’ve been hanging lots with Jean-Marc and Greg Blondeau today, and although the guys are in the top 3 they still push and show the way – too cool.
Ronny, myself and Yassen, and Wagga Watts and the Valics, Pepe Malecki and most everyone really, have also been chasing leadout points today, these make a noticable difference to the scores so it pays to be on the ball, and since that is what they’re made to do I guess they’re working as intended. The lead gaggle took a real prudent line over to the Elefante turnpoint today, trying to stick with the convergence as long as we could. This proved an opportunity for the second wave to catch up, and catch up they did. Coming back from Elefante over the high ground it got pretty shady and quite a few pilots got caught there. Once we were back onto the Sacamacate knob things started to heat up, and much time could be made up by getting the glide from there to El Penon right. 14 years of practice flying here is proving pretty advantageous for Ronny – he seems to always get the lines right, and I’m actually not too proud to be pimpin’ a bit on that experience… The way to Tezca looked awfully blue so we were going a bit more mellow on that leg, and it proved the right thing to do as the turnpoint wasn’t actually working in spite of a good Cu sitting over it. As it was, the pilots who stopped right on the 4km cylinder to climb in some weak stuff had it much better than those few who pushed on to try and get the cloud but only found zeroes. MANY pilots got caught there, and since there was a 20km headwind on the leg back towards launch you needed all the altitude you could get to make it onto the launch ridge.
It was fun to watch all the gliders being pushed to close to their max speed coming back into the wind there. I must say I’m really impressed with the stability of the things, no one seems to have any serious problems going 60+km/h into a fairly strong and bumpy headwind – just think of the deathships we were flying ten years ago!
Once we connected to the launch ridge again there was a decent climb to be had, and from there there was a choice of going around the back bowl (potentially in the lee of El Penon) or round the front of said rock. Olli and a few others went the back route and got a good climb there, while another group with myself in it tried the front and got hammered a bit in the turbulence there. I then let myself drift back a bit from El Penon, while Jean-Marc and some others did the sensible thing and stayed on the windward side, only my move paid off and I soon found myself climbing up to meet the lead group right before the glide towards the last turnpoint at Escalera. Once that was bagged we needed about 200 m of extra altitude to be sure to glide into goal, but luckily Pepe was ahead a few 100 m and had already found a nice mellow climb for us. Then it was really about when you thought you had enough for the reamining 6km of gliding, and as usual that happened pretty simultaneously so we all crossed within a few seconds of each other. As it turned out two pilots had actually escaped the gaggle unnoticed so they beat us by a good few minutes, and lots of pilots were just short of the goal in spite of making the 1km end of speed section.
The results will see a great shakeup after this task. Many of the leaders appear to have landed short, including, sadly, Eric Reed who has been in the lead until now.
Phil Broers thrashed his wing in a tree yesterday so he’s now flying that UP proto that Ronny didn’t like. He made it till shortly before goal and seemed content so that’s good news. And rumour has it that Jouni from Finland has put his reserve glider in trees today, wonder what he’ll be flying then?? The bad news, from a Danish perspective, is that both my team mates landed short, with Morten allegedly also hanging from a tree somewhere, so maybe he’ll be launching on my trusted old Edge tommorrow. We’ll need to sort the risers on that thing, I stole them last night to put them on my current proto and if Torsten doesn’t have extra trimmers here then I can’t really let Morten fly it. Lots to sort, and time is already 8 PM, so this is where this blog entry ends, thanks for reading the rants, oh and by the way to Bruce I passed your message on to Phil and he says he’s been trying like mad to reach you but to no avail, real strange.
Mads.
