Having an apartment in the village helps a lot; I could relax in the morning and left just before noon. A relaxing ride up on the chairlift and I was at launch in plenty of time. A 60 km task was called which involved a ridge-run South then a run back North over the open valley system, crossing the lake, before heading back South to the standard LZ near the village.
You don’t have a lot of height to work with off launch here and a lot of the early launchers struggled. My energy levels seemed a bit low and I wondered if I was going to have a short day. I launched towards the back of the group and there were enough pilots in the air to mark the useful lift. My energy levels increased with my altitude! My timing was pretty good; things only got really busy for the last 10 minutes before the start and I was well positioned without having to endure too much traffic.
Things went pretty well, I was towards the back of the group, with plenty of pilots to mark the lift in front of me and just enough pilots to thermal with to make things easier. Conditions were pretty strong; at one point I left a thermaI that I found a little too rough (I can’t remember the last time I’ve done that). The wind was behind us for the run South, and I tagged the way-point without problem then climbed up towards the base of a cloud before the run NW into the wind.
I applied speedbar to leave the cloud – and it didn’t work. The left side was jammed and I couldn’t operate it. I was flying into around a 6 to 8 mph head wind, wanting to use half-bar but couldn’t. For the next 10 Km gliders passed me as I got lower and lower; there wasn’t much I could do about it. Over the open valley, I could find some lift, but it wasn’t really strong enough to overcome the drift. I got the next way point, but was low by then. I really wanted to head E to get back onto the main ridge, but I was too low to make it that far. So I headed NE, along the course line. Unless I could get a bunch of altitude, I didn’t want to commit to crossing the lake (there are very few landing spots down near the shore). I flew low over goal and I could have continued for another couple of Km because the ground falls away down to the lake, but ground-suck set in and I landed in goal without tagging the last two waypoints. As I was walking back to my apartment, the leaders came flying in.
The super sophisticated id-cards weren’t ready in the morning but we seemed to be able to fly reasonably well without them.
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