The opening & the first contest day

As I haven’t been writing about gliding much, so I start with the contest day.

Strong winds (360/40), blue, max 2000 meter., thermals between 2,5 and 4 m/s. A short taks: 183 km/h. I guess they were afraid the wind was going to mess up the thermals. But it didn’t. I have a habbit of messing up the first day. The goal was to change that. I fly alone in a plane I don’t know, in a country that I don’t know and the sky is just blue. So what will be the tactics? Start late… That’s pretty hard for me, because it not the flying that I like. I want to go, not wait. But Sweden 2006 learned me to do it and I kept strong and departed almost last. Tactics: stay high and use the others to point out the good thermals. And it worked! Because I didn’t climb out the thermals as the proceeding gliders did, I gained bit by bit. After that I could even get away a bit. I placed 5th. The fastest of the late starters, so I found one reason why the French were faster (they had the benefit of teamflaing, that gave them the option to start early), but they were much faster, so what did they do? I had a look at their files: they even got out of the thermals earlier than I did, not climbing out of 1900 meters and they got down to 1100, a bit deeper than I did. But that still doesn’t count up for the lost time: my final glide was slow. I just couldn’t find the thermal downwind and I had to fly slow to keep the path. I could just keep the path and I threw in a couple of rounds against 40 km/h of wind. That will account for the rest I think… Anyway, we reached our goal not messing up the first day. Today will be similar (it is HOT!), but now we have an AAT. That changes the tactics dramatically. But for now I’m not goanna tell you what that will be:)

Results: http://www.soaringspot.com/sgc12/results/standard/daily/day1.html

The opening. What can I say? They put in a lot of effort in it and the whole town participated. One teacher started half a year ago letting the children make paper and plastic airplanes. They even had an Olympic fire, that they walked (!) over from the town center to the airfield, which I see burning from my tent as we speak. The best way to get an impression is to watch the pictures:

http://www.chavesdigital.com.ar/verfotos.php?id=11204