World Cup - Brazil 2023 - Pico do Gaviao, Andradas - Task 1 87km

 I woke to a favourable forecast after a death-like sleep of exhaustion. A four thousand meter cloud base is normally cause for celebration, but sadly the three thousand meter limit makes for stressful flying if you want to avoid being penalised.  Many pilots got it wrong and paid the price with point deductions on a sliding scale.  If you break the limit by a few meters it is not so bad, but break it by one hundred meters or more and you get zero.  There will be unhappy pilots for sure.

The task was set to the west initially followed by a dog-leg north with goal at an airstrip some sixty odd kilometers north west of launch making the optimised task length just short of ninety kilometers.  There were few opportunities for any creative flying, so the inevitable procession saw almost all competitors into goal with half the field into goal within 16 minutes of the winner.  The points were squashed up with the first 75 pilots getting 800 points or more. 

I was 16 minutes off the pace and 5 minutes behind Russel who finished in the top 30.  Jon was another few minutes behind and Khobi brought up the back of the field with a hard earned goal.

It seems not much has changed over the last four years in the world cup style of racing.  We may not have covered ourselves in glory today, but it was an adequate performance by team SA given the extreme low airtime and prolonged lack of comp exposure.  This bodes well for the rest of the comp as we have the opportunity to improve.   

There is something perverse about leaving a 5m/s thermal prematurely and just as it begins to accelerate, but I guess them is the rules, so we play along...