31 August 2012

Day 3: 59km around 4tp

Today it was Pedro Garcia from Barcelona again who stunned me. Yesterday he won the day by a lot of kilometers on his own, and also today he kept flying very confidently leading out on his own, while everybody else of us seems to land within 15 minutes when on his own in the blue flat hills in a 30km/h wind. I will ask him tomorrow what kind of trick he uses ;) ¡Congratulaciónes, Pedro, estás volando mejor que los pajaros aqui!
Same same as yesterday - sky blue, base low, wind strong, gaggle unforgiving. Some gaggles even gaggled themselves onto the deck. After lots of discussions about the length of todays task (with 70km nominal distance, we would get low validities with short tasks), task setters Primoz, Tugi and Christian agreed on a small task of 59km around 4 turnpoints. Small did not mean easy- many pilots bombed out, a few had a second launch. Strong cross wind on take of slowed the start down again.
Of course there was a push on already when I took off as 37th pilot. Regina and Uli were hanging on my wires while the strong cross wind kept pulling up my left wing. Luckily the launch marshall, Heather Mull, knows what she is doing. Ive flown about 14 Bogong Cups that she organized, and she always got pilots safely off very difficult launches, so I was positive that I would be fine.
The wind dropped and straightened up just a little bit, enough for me to get into the air. With my tiny wingload on the Moyes LS 3,5s (I don´t take ballast as the landings here are quite difficult) it is tough to fight the headwind and turbulent, broken lift in big gaggles, but at least it is easy for me to climb fast.
Today I was lucky to have been in the right place at the right time. Primoz went right and landed, I went left and just managed to drift along in a zero. Pilots kept landing when they got too low, so I tried to stay as high as possible.
At the 2nd turnpoint, our group caught up with the leading guys Alex, Pedro, Davide and a few more. Mischu (Slo) got impatient, bailed out in front - and landed.
Bit by bit, Roland and I climb-drifted our way past the 3rd turnpoint, but the last one before goal was high up (1730m) and tricky, in the mountains again. Strong wind, no landings.
Alex, Roland, Pedro and Suan had gone out to the front and found a light climb, and I was quite proud when I could call Roland over into a 3m up just to the east of them. Our last thermal before goal was the nicest one of the day and rewarded us for our hard work. This was not pilots fighting each other, but rather friends celebrating a smooth lift up after a long day of hard work! Well, the glide to the last turnpoint and to goal was mainly on the leeside of mountains, so it was anything but smooth, but still we knew that we had it.
Tullio landed just after me, Dan had to work quite hard again through the lee side of the mountain.
Our team is 2nd now after the Italians and in front of the Spanish.
I am happy that I could score a few points for our team today - and I would like to thank Klaus Tänzler from DHV and my team leader Regina for their trust in me. Even though I had a long break after some injuries last year, and even though it was obvious that there are not enough women here to have a new title, they sent me here because they thought I could be helpful for our team and maybe even score for the team. We are all motivated to do our best!
My report in German on the DHV-page.



Keine Kommentare: