The flex wing results.

The rigid wing results.

With a stronger forecast and less winds in the offing, the task committee goes whole hog and calls an 83 mile parallelogram compared to the 63 mile triangle on Sunday. Maybe Dustin and Jonny are trying to push their competition a bit too hard.

Things get exciting in the launch paddock when Rhett Radford, tug pilot extraordinaire, clips the top of my glider and breaks the leading edge of Larry Bunner's glider in front of me. I think that sends Rob Kells scrambling for a new glider for Larry. Kraig Coomber very nicely comes over and checks my glider to be sure that the aluminum and carbon bits are okay and that it is just a mark on the sail.

Rhett came in close to get to the Dragonfly down in front of the line and hit a bit of sink. When he hit the throttle it stalled instead of taking off. Hitting the throttle does that. You need to ease it on according to Russell Brown. There was damage to the tug also.

We were launching in light cross winds. I got on the cart but noticed that the back was too high. I ignored it and off we went. Then the glider was stuck to the cart. I finally jiggled it off the cart, but zoomed right up and blew the weaklink. Now I had to land down wind or cross wind. I tried hard as I could to get the glider to turn into the wind, but no luck (as I was only twenty feet high). So I just flared at the last second and that worked, although I was covered in dust.

I was not the only one breaking weaklinks as it seemed for a while every third pilot was having this problem. You've got to get the keel cradle set right.

Back on the cart again after a clean up and this time through the dust and into the air only to be knocked off the tug (I pulled the release) at 600'. The tug was going one way and I was going the other. The lift was broken and light in spite of what I might have thought from the theatrics on tow, so I had to hold on and be patience as I thermalled over our trailer and Oz Report World Headquarters.

Finally I got up and joined the rest of the pilots as we slowly worked the weak and broken lift to over 5,000' MSL. I saw a few pilots over me heading in the direction of the edge of the start cylinder so I tagged along. This is usually a bit dangerous as I have no one to keep an eye on below me as we left thirty glider behind.

Sure enough I don't find much and go in search mode on my own. Fortunately, I found a great thermal that got me up fast to 6,400' MSL, the highest I would be all day. It was almost time for the start window to open, but sure enough no one wanted to go. I lead out hoping to entice some folks to leave with me but it didn't work, and as I didn't want to go on my own, I went back and lost two thousand feet looking for lift. Ridiculous.

I took a low start at the second start time and it turned out that pilots still waited for later start times. This was a long course up wind. Maybe they thought the day would get better, as the forecast had predicted, but it wasn't to be.

There were a couple of pilots out on course but not much help. I thought that this was supposed to be a race? I got low (600' AGL) pretty quickly and had to settle for a tractor in a dusty field. Fortunately a few little dust devils did appear near it and I was able to get back up, but not high, 3,500' AGL.

Low again after the turnpoint at La Palma, I was down to 300' AGL and looking at where to land. But I was over a big open field and was feeling a bit of lift (that turned out to average 50 fpm), so I just kept turning until I spotted a dust devil nearby and that got me out of there. It was especially nice that the wind was blowing out of the north at 10 mph toward the next turnpoint. Still no one around.

I could not get high and I had to keep working dust devils low to stay in the game. As I drifted toward the Red Rock turnpoint to the southeast I was squeezed in between some peaks and the winds from the south west picked up to 15 mph.  But I did finally find some good lift and got up to 6,200' MSL. This was four miles before the turnpoint which would put me directly back into the wind. So it was nice to get high before the turnpoint.

Unfortunately, I didn't get much lift after that and coming into the turnpoint I  was down in 2,200' AGL. Ahead I could see that there was a long stretch of difficult retrieval into a 14 mph head wind. I decided to go as far as I could and then turn around and land back at Red Rock close to the road.

Many pilots landed just a five miles up the course line and it was a mere twenty miles in to get to them.

Check out the results above. Brian Porter was the only one to make it back on his Swift.

The winds were stronger than forecast, the lift was lighter, and the altitudes reach by most pilots were not as high as forecast.