Paragliding in BC

Paragliding in BC

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Day Four, Task 2

After sitting on launch for 5 hours...we flew! The winds finally backed off enough for us to all launch safely, but it was still more wind than I'm used to flying in back home. We were at a small, tight launch which made taking off a little tricky but all those hours of kiting paid off and both George & I had great take-offs. 

                  Waiting to launch

Yesterday's top flight was only worth 130 points for the top pilot (out of a possible 1000) so we were hoping for a better day to make up some points. Today's conditions were also challenging - windy and no one could get very high - so once again no one made goal and the top pilot got just over 200 today. 

I made the entry start cylinder today which was upwind from launch and then flew about halfway to the next point, but when I saw pilots descending vertically I decided to veer off into the landing zone at HQ which was just a couple of fields away. I saw another pilot landing across the river and thought about flying over to join him as it was further along the course line, but due to the scoring parameters we ended up with the same points at the end of the day. It ended up being a much nicer landing field so a good decision after all.  Most fields are full of crops right now - corn, wheat and soya - and we've been asked to try to land on the roads between crops (for obvious reasons) so there have been some pretty entertaining landing stories about avoiding those fields so far!

Tomorrow still looks great so we're on track for 3 or even 4 tasks this comp. Woot woot!



1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks for the updates Martina! Here's hoping conditions improve for the remainder of the competition. Best of luck! :-)