The flight and task.

The Oz Report Oz Weather page comes into its own as Len Paton and I de facto share the weather forecasting duties. With the RASP and XC Maps, as well as BOM resources I call a strong east wind, 10 knots on the ground 16 knots at the top of lift.  The lift is forecasted to go to almost 8,000' MSL with 500 fpm lift.

It looks like a good day to go far to the west, say 230 km to Rankin Springs, but wait, the locals are saying that the roads are washed out and it is flooded and full of swamps out there. Their arms are waving in the air.

The task committee freaks and calls a 125 km task just short of Lake Cargelligo thinking that the lake has expanded and maybe the road near it will be under water. This turns out to be a paraglider task (although not the type of paraglider task that they had in the last Worlds in Australia).

With the the wind strong out of the east (with a hint of south) they are reluctant to send us south west to Wyalong as a turnpoint to keep us by the main highway. Straight west sends us over dirt roads, but then they are worried about sending us further than Lake Cargelligo, as they think it is flooding out there.

All this turns out to be way way over blown. We don't find swamps or lakes or flooding rivers. We find dust devils, brown fields and lots of lift.

I got off early as usual, in this case an hour before the mandatory start gate (for the top twenty) at 3 PM. The tug pilot put me a bit down wind in a thermal by myself and I stay by myself for a while trying to zip up harness. No luck. One third zipped up on top and one third on the bottom with a hole in the middle. Oh well, at least I won't fall out of it.

After a while I moved upwind and hooked up with other pilots and we climbed out to 7,500' MSL (we are at 600 feet). A gaggle of pilots had been blown past the edge of the 10 kilometer start cylinder and they had to come back to join the five of us getting high inside the start cylinder. The climb was perfectly timed and I got the start gate at twelve seconds after 3 PM. Jeff Shapiro was in the lead and high with me, but it turned out that he didn't go back far enough to get the start circle. He didn't know the secret about how to get the Flytec 6030 to display the later start time (in this case the 3 PM start time) and had put in the first start time. So 18 minutes got added to his elapsed time.

The first glide was 15 km and I lost 4,000'. I was out in front with Jeff but my glide was not good. No doubt due to my increased drag (harness open and head pulley). I saw Gerolf just gliding great, coming from behind us, staying high and getting in front of us. His glide was magnificent and he flies a Litespeed RS 4 (and he is a skinny guy and he was flying without ballast). He says it doesn't do him all that much good as if he doesn't find the thermal, he has to go back and join up with other pilots. Balasz was apparently doing well also.

We worked 400 fpm in the first thermal on course. We didn't see any swamps and it looked good and dry below.

The next thermal wasn't so friendly. It was a twenty kilometer glide with a lose of 4,500' down to 1,500' AGL. We all spread out and had to work broken lift to get back up as we drifted over trees. It took us a while to find strong lift as at first we were in survival only mode.

After that it was a cake walk with plenty of lift to goal. At thirty kilometers out we were on final glide but the sink was bad for the next fifteen kilometers. I took another thermal there and then there was very little sink all the rest of the way in and it was hard to get down.

About forty pilots made goal. The place was packed (there are 58 in the meet). I don't know the results yet.

No results yet. I'll have a URL soon.