Paragliding in BC

Paragliding in BC

Monday, June 20, 2011

Rat Race - Day One

Stupid stupid stupid.

Stupid!

On the bright side, I got all my stupid mistakes out on the first day & have 6 more flying days to redeem myself.

I wasn't even rushed on launch. I was one of the last people to take-off because I wanted to just have a good flight & make goal on the first day and not get caught up in the "racing" and bomb out. Had a perfect take off, found a thermal right away and took it to 700 meters/2000 feet over launch. After topping out I noticed I was kind of uncomfortable in my seat & tried to grab my stirrup to adjust, but that didn't help. It felt like something was digging into my legs...it was my speedbar. Somehow I hadn't noticed that my leg loop had been threaded through the first step of my bar when I took off and now there was nothing I could do about it. Well, I briefly considered undoing one leg strap at a time to release it but falling out of my harness sounded like a worse option than flying around uncomfortably.

By now I had lost some height from losing focus but thought I was still high enough to make the first crossing. I hadn't realized how much I relied on my speedbar until I hit some massive sink & couldn't speed up to get out of there. That, and there was no way I was going to arrive high enough at the next ridge without my bar. So boo-hoo I landed at the field below take-off and chalked it up to experience. At least I'd gotten out of the start cylinder, and I was interested in downloading my flight to see what my flight looked like anyway.

That brings me to my gps. Somehow while fiddling with it I changed a very important setting. It must have happened yesterday since it was working perfectly in France. The way pilots are scored in a comp is that each person flies with a gps, is given a course to fly and then the tracklog is recorded on the gps so the scorekeepers can see that you hit all the points. The tracklog "drops" a point on the map every few seconds & you get a little trail. Somehow I changed my setting to record a point every 30 hours instead of 3 seconds so there wasn't even a flight to download!

Things could be worse. I could've made goal & not had the gps record it. The beer keg could've run out. I could've ended up in a tree (but that guy still did better than me today). Looking at the scores, a lot of people seemed to have bombed out within the 5km start cylinder so I'm not alone at the bottom of the list. And the best thing about being in last place (with 40 other people) is that there's nowhere to go but up!

Scores will be posted here for the Sprint:

http://www.flyxc.org/2011RatRaceSprint.html

3 comments:

Marky Mark said...

Hello, Mark (shorts eater) here. Back in San Diego wishing I could be with you guys at the rat race. I'd love to hear from you anything that they do there that we should do at the Chabre comp (don't mention organising the weather though).
Good luck and have fun.
Marky Mark

Anonymous said...

Oh, no, Martina!
That is a pity, but at least nothing was lost because of the GPS settings ;-)

Good luck, tomorrow!

Daniel

Martina said...

Marky Mark! Nice to hear from you. Hope those shorts didn't give you indigestion.

I'll give you a rundown next week, send me an email if you like (there should be a link under 'view my profile').

Or just come by - San Diego isn't that far!