My Belgian nationals started with a rather good first task, but things were dramatically worse on task 2 and 3. In both those tasks, I was flying high and fast, but managed to hit the deck from top of lift. On task 2, I probably chose the wrong side of a lift line, hit major sink, tried to escape the wrong way and was even faster on the ground after that. On task 3, I took a late and low 2nd start gate, but joined up with Glen and Nils after 2 very strong thermals. I was positively surprised about the day quality and should have slowed down when we first flew into the flats. I didn't and that was the end of task 3.
My main contender for the Belgian championship, Tom Haagdorens (my flight instructor), flew 3 very consistent tasks and now was 700 points in the lead. It left me with one option: fly very fast during the next 4 days.
Task 4 was a nice 105 km task and I went for it because I didn't want to have Tom on my tail. I immediately got lower than intended and lost some time. Tom met up with me after 30 km, but it wasn't a nice thermal and I headed out low. That was a good decision and I ended up 2nd for the task, eating away 250 points from Tom.
3 Days to go, 450 points behind now. The stage was set for a very nice battle.
Sadly, both task 5 and 6 had to be canceled due to high winds, so I'm now looking at a 450 point deficit for the last day. The weather was predicted to be very good for today, but looking out the window this morning, it shows a lot of clouds and high instability. I hope we can still fly...
A local TV station visited us on launch and made this little report:
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