Wednesday 25 January 2012

Valle Super Final - Day 1 -Task 1

Day 1 dawned with a slight chill in the air. Dramatic you may think but completely irrelevant because the flying is more or less the same everyday regardless of chill or wind or cloud or even the entrails of the possum roadkill on the way to launch in our taxi.

An interesting TASK was set requiring some thought and decision making and several changes of pace.
Start was an exit 5km from Piano with entire field on course above 3,500m ASL. Then off to Santa Maria which is normally tricky, but today proved to be easy and most got back to Maguey unscathed. The run to Elefant started fast and furious quickly deteriorating into a slow and painful phase with many pilots low and slow pushing back into the 10km/h headwind after Elefant. With 15 km to go there was some serious jockeying for position to take the last tp before the sprint to the end of SS. I decided to take the line left of the course closer to the hills which proved to be good. At least two pilots landed in the trees including our illustrious chairman, Goran. Veteran ex-world champion Hans Bollinger took the task from Raul Penso, Dusan Oros, AndreR & MarcusM. First lady was Petra who is the only female flying a two liner (and maybe Seiko). Elise Houdry went home after a day here. She was sick and some say she did not have a two-liner...

Full results can be found here

This is what goal looks like if you arrive on time!

Landing is a little tight....

... And some land in the water...

Meet center

2 comments:

Mushahid said...

Hi,
I have been reading this blog since many days and it is an interesting an useful blog really. Despite the considerable difference in equipment, that may be checked from gleitschirmfliegen and the two activities offer similar pleasures and some pilots are involved in both sports.
Thanks

AndreR said...

Hi Mushahid

Thanks for your comments. It is a real privilege to be here and to see first hand how the sport has developed with equipment. In one way I think it is good to compete equally, but then again we all wish for more/ultimate performance.