HGFA Skysailor Magazine

10 SKY SAILOR November | December 2018 about this clumsy move, I end up pushing harder after my perceived mistake, which meant going lower. I rounded the last TP quite low, exactly when I needed to be high, what was more, I was doing a low save drifting me towards… Canada. Not happy. Contemplating how long it would take me to do this last leg in saw-tooth mode, I thought that if I’d made one week’s worth of mistakes yesterday, thenthis day looked like I was making two weeks’ worth. I could see Brownfield, our goal, far away. I wished for a dusty right now, just about… here. As I kept scanning, the dust actually began to rise from where I was looking at! I told myself it was time to stop being negative. I reached the dust devil, a nice 3-4m/sec textbook lift. Fast final glide, almost a non-event. I should be so lucky… Rudy was already in goal, I arrived second and was happy with that. A lot of pilots followed shortly after. I came fourth for the day, but again, I was glad to be there. I wasn’t proud of my decisionmaking, yet after this task I moved up to overall first place with a fair margin. Zac didn’t make goal and this was significant since he is one of the very best, especially around here. I remembered how hard it was to beat him five years ago. He is fast, I kept joking that I wanted to fly next to him to experience a sonic boom first hand on a hang glider. Third day. The longer term weather forecast wasn’t looking good, some said it might be our last day. We hoped not, but nevertheless, we had to modify the task from going further to the north- west to a zig-zag ending up in Lamesa, because looking at the radar, the weather change was already not far north of us. The last leg looked straight into the wind. This was going to be exciting. Sport class went a different route, but to the same goal. I ended up taking the second clock, once more not by choice. It annoyed me a little, but this time I was more motivated by it. I also knew I had to be more careful, because I had a feeling that I just wanted to go like a racehorse. The first leg turned out to be picture perfect. I flew with Robin, on his RX3.5 Pro, doing the same speed. I was happy to see him, at least we could fly together. After the first TP there was a big dust devil, no thinking was necessary because it was so obvious – 5-6m/sec on the vario occasionally. This put us in reach of the group from the previous clock. Not all, but many of them. Good enough. I kept pushing for stronger lift, but not quite getting it. I broke the USB port on my trusty Kobo instrument the day before, so was navigating with old technology. It was harder to line up the optimum point on the TP circle today, because we were using large radii, but this is not the time to worry about it. I kept looking to see how many people were coming back from the second TP – not many – so I thought I was doing well. After turning, I realised just how strong the crosswind was, yet I watched people turning in light stuff and drifting way off course. I decided to be more proactive and pushed a lot more into the wind. I had company and we had good climbs so this was paying off. I dreaded the thought of the last leg though. I touched the third circle hoping for lift, but was down to 600m, so I knew I was going to see the TP circle again. I spotted Zac and Derreck circling up, so there was no other choice. Then, magic happened. We climbed out and there was no sink. We hit the perfect lift line all the way to goal. I had about 10:1 to goal, which normally would be far from enough on a windy leg like this, but what we were experiencing wasn’t normal. Zac was slightly ahead and above on about 7:1. I stopped for a few circles, then got greedy as I Attila shows off the colour of his Moyes glider as he flies over goal on Day 3 of the competition Big Spring 2018