Saturday, August 8, 2009

Dutch Open, Task 3 & 4

Task 3 saw very good flying conditions and a 118 km task was set. The task launched at Aspres. 1st Turnpoint was montagne d'Oule, then Chabre, then back to Pic de Bure before heading towards Hongrie and landing at the camping.
I managed to get to Chabre and then didn't have a good plan to get to Pic de Bure. Just before arriving at d'Oule for the second time, I flew through a 2 m/s thermal, thinking that it would be better at d'Oule itself. That wasn't the case and I landed at 61 kms. Bad mistake! Fell from 22nd in the general classification to 27th.
Yesterday a small cold front came through and thunderstorms were predicted. If we were to fly, it was going to happen early. A 90 km task was set with early start gates. It soon became evident that there was going to be overdevelopment, so I started early to do as much as I could before the task became too dangerous or got stopped. A large cloud developed over Aspres and we all waited at the base for the first start gate. Flying under the cloud to get lift and then heading out in the blue again to avoid being sucked up. Quite a nice game :-)
I started with the first gaggle and made the unbelievable error to leave them when I saw Richard gliding better 2/3 kms to my right hand side. In between was sink... A very short 47 min. flight was the result and I got rewarded with minimum distance. Don't know the effect on the overall results yet. The task was stopped when the leaders were 50 kms into it. About 17 pilots hadn't even been able to start at that point.

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