SAFA Skysailor Magazine

SKY SAILOR 15 March | April 2020 the final glide and despite the strong headwind everybody came in very high. Day 6 had similar weather, but the Skysight forecast seemed to get it wrong every day. Cloud- base prediction was usually way off. Winds turned out to be stronger – Windy got it quite right. All in hindsight, of course. Again, we went for a flat triangle, this time to the north, turning at Peak Hill, then back to Forbes via a turnpoint at the corner of the State Forest east of Forbes. We had the best conditions on this day, big thermals both in size and strength. It was nice to fly with some people for a change, but it only lasted up to the first turnpoint, after that it was lonely flying again. It is my hungarian accent, I think. I was flying fairly upwind and things were working out nicely until I didn’t find a strong high climb before turning at the forest – quasi ahead, but with a longer fruitless glide. I was quite despa- rate to find lift, turning into the strong headwind quite low, when I noticed a 90º wind change on the surface of the small ponds that told me which way to go. As soon as I hooked into the 3-4m/sec lift, I see the dust picking up. A little later, I was climbing right over the eye of this micro tornado. The dust tube of the dust devil was so perfectly formed that it was mesmerising as well as beautiful to look straight down the pipe while going up. By this time, everybody was all over me, below and above, but I was happy to see the ones above didn’t yet have the turnpoint, so I had a chance to place well. I ended up winning the final glide, giving me another 1000 point day, Josh came 2nd and Rohan 3rd. A lot of happy people arrived in goal shortly after. On Day 7 a weather change was happening. It complicated matters even further. The temperature diagram looked bad, showing a max climb to 1000m at the beginning of our flight, but slightly improv- ing later, a blue day, for sure. We settled on a short Oyvind Ellefsen – Norway coming into goal at Bill’s Paddock on task 3, 156.2 km triangular type of task On tow, Forbes 2020 Marc-Andre Rathe (Can) behind Dragonfly pilot Marco Carelli Photos: Peak Pictures