World Champs: MEXICO - Day 1 Task 1

74km triangle with dog leg around 5 turn points and goal at a 400m radius of the radio towers above Valle.

Cloud base <3000m>

Cloud Cover 3-5/8ths with cloud streets along the course.

Wind Variable < 5kts.

Max Climb 7.1m/s

Average Climb for the day +- 2-3m/s

This was a crowd pleaser if ever I saw one109 pilots made goal with the leaders taking about 2 hours. The meet director said this was a ‘typical’ Valle task which included a bit of flat lands.

The boys all got in with Andre a few minutes off the pace followed by Nevil and Henry a short while later. Desi did about 64km landing on a perfectly manicured lawn on some or other ranch.

The day was characterised by cloud avoidance at the start followed by positional jockeying until midway and then all out racing toward the end.

An added dimension of getting goal, is if you land within the last kilometre, you’re sure of getting wet in the dam. One of the few times getting goal 100m below is possible.

Landing resembled an air traffic control nightmare with just about the entire field landing at ten second intervals on a tennis court sized LZ.

Quote of the day: “Does the sun come up in the east here?”

Not a bad start for team SA, the results are as follows:

Andre 18^th

Nevil 49^th

Henry 70^th

Desi 114^th