The British Open, Day One

The British Open is being held this week at St Andre, and, since it is now 'my local site', I felt obliged to enter it. 150 pilots have entered; the majority British, but also a lot of French and other nationalities.

Sunday was the first day and it promised to be windy; near the top-end of what I fly here, and an early launch looked the best bet. But competitions are fairly inflexible beasts in terms of timing; it just takes a long time to get everyone up the hill, a task decided, GPSs programmed etc. A short (62Km), technical task was called; the hardest part would be the first half, as it was either up-wind or cross-wind and was over relatively low terrain to the west.

Launch opened at 12.20, with the task starting at 1.20. The combination of meteo wind and strong cycles didn't make launching easy, but everyone seemed to get away safely. I got off fairly early and didn't have any trouble getting high; up to 2850m on the main ridge, near the Antennae. It wasn't particularly obvious to me how best to start the task; the first turnpoint was 12K from launch, but the start was an entry cylinder at 8K around it. I thought the best approach was to push west, into the wind, and get onto a shallow ridge SSE of the turnpoint; then you could wait for the start and fly mostly cross-wind to tag it.

The main gaggle was higher but further away. I headed W with a group of wings; after a sinky glide, we got established on this ridge and could thermal back up. But the climbs were slower and you drifted too much if you tried to get high. The highest I took any thermal was to 2000m. The task started and I made my way slowly to the first turn-point; as usual, I seemed to find myself flying alone. Got the turn point, back to the shallow ridge and headed S to the next turn-point.

There were good thermals, but the wind was getting stronger all the time and the drift made them hard to use. If you haven't tried it, flying cross-wind in a paraglider is a lot harder than it sounds! The second turnpoint was the summit of shallow hill where three valleys meet. If you could get the turn-point high enough, you could probably glide downwind back to the main ridge at St Andre and onto easier flying. If you arrived low, you could expect it to be windy and difficult.

Unfortunately, I arrived low - bad-planning on my part; I should have been pushing W instead of drifting E in thermals. I found lift near the turn-point, but the combination of the wind and nasty terrain downwind made it hard to use. 500m short of tagging the turn-point, I decided to push out front and see if I could get higher, but again no luck. It was easy to stay up and I could still have tagged the turn-point, but it didn't look likely I could get away again. At this point, I decided it was just too windy and to go out and land. On full bar I had about 15K penetration; after 12 minutes off this I joined a couple of pilots in a nice field.

As I landed, the task was stopped because of the high winds. 35 pilots had made goal and the task was scored.

Tracklog