Manilla XC Open, day 1

We were up early today…partly due to the warm weather but also because of the birds. But they weren’t too bad and I didn’t find them too annoying. But it gave us a chance to get a good breakfast in (thanks Tom!), get our gear all sorted out, and get to the HQ for the morning meeting. Then off to the post office to order our CDMA phones, since GSM phones don’t work in Manilla. Hopefully they’ll be here in time for tomorrow’s flight.

Launch is at the end of a ridge, just as it dips to a saddle, so there are multiple launches (N, E, S, W). It’s not very high, about 860 m ASL (and the ground is about 300m ASL), so there’s not very much time to mess around finding lift. You either find it right away, or you have to head out to land. When we arrived at the top we got to the east launch first, where everyone was hanging out and kiting gliders on the Astroturf. This launch is large…you can lie out 6-7 gliders end to end, and probably 6 or 7 deep, for around 50 gliders at a time. And it’s all Astroturf, so no snags or twigs to catch on comp lines.

The west launch is larger, and a bit higher too. It’s also astroturfed. There’s a toilet block set up, and a concession stand too for food, ice cream, and water. The one thing missing is shade. There are a few trees, but they are pretty much leafless, and it’s boiling hot up there. So lots of water and sunscreen is a must for parawaiting up there (and the sun is very fierce here; good thing it’s a dry heat and not like the Brazilian heat)!

While hanging out on the east launch we observed some dust devils in the area, and we should have probably went then (it was about 11am). But it being our first time up there, and the first day of the XC comp, nobody wanted to go first, and in the end, we didn’t launch until about 1pm. By then the winds had switched to primarily west, and most people migrated over to the west launch. But we didn’t want to schlep all our stuff up the hill and over the other side, and it was still blowing up on the east side, so we stayed there. We ended up having the whole launch to ourselves!

Apparently on the west launch it was a gong show, with pilots trying to launch all over the place, getting dragged, etc etc etc. Glad we had a nice quiet launch where we could kite our gliders as much as we wanted, and not be in the way of anyone else.

Keith launched and didn’t get a good cycle, and was pretty soon on the ground at the east launch LZ. But Tom went to get him (Tom was driving for us today since his glider didn’t show up) and Keith was able to relaunch (relaunches are OK, since it’s your best flight of the day that counts). I had already launched by then and was in the air over launch, where it was nice and not too ratty. I was more in the mood to find out how my new glider would fly, and flying big XC was actually secondary at that point. This decision was helped by the fact that 2 storm cells were to the north of launch (and it was blowing south, so any XC would be towards them), and they looked pretty intimidating.

After getting a bit more used to the glider I headed north to see what I could do. At this point the 2 storm cells were pretty much merged, and lightening was shooting out of it, and rain below. It didn’t look very inviting, and I wasn’t in the mood for cloud-sucking my way XC, so I ended up landing about 16 km from launch.

Keith and Nicky Moss had landed about 1 km further than me, and Will was further north. Turns out he had raced ahead of the merging storms before they merged, and got to the other side, but they were growing in the other direction too and he was outrunning it on the other side. He managed to get about 58 km before deciding to land.

We didn’t know this, since we were cell-phone-less, and radio contact was sporadic on the ground. So we ended up driving to the 90 km mark, where we picked up 2 Swiss pilots, Chrigel Maurer and Stefan Wyss, who had landed at about 88 and 89 km out. I think they were about the farthest for today. Finally found Will back at the 58 km mark and then back to the campground.

Ewa didn’t have a good day. She got cloud-sucked into one of the storm cells, and accounts differ at this point about what happened to her. But she’s in the hospital. The storm cloud had a cloud top of at least 10,000 m, so she was definitely very high. The tracklog will let us know how high she actually got.

Despite not flying very far, I was happy with my flight. First time really flying this new glider, and first time thermalling in about 4 or 5 months. So I consider it a well-worthwhile flight, and we have 7 more flying days for this comp (and only the best 4 flights count anyways, so we can throw 4 flights out). And after hearing about Ewa, I’m glad I landed when I did.

Hopefully things will dry out a bit more and we won’t have to worry about over-development in the afternoons. And now that we know what things are all about, we’ll launch earlier too! And driving the highway north on retrieve was a good idea too, since we now know all the little towns on the way for the first 100 km or so, so when we land in that direction, we’ll know where we are.

Photos are at http://mclearn.ca/gallery/, and click on "Nicole's albums" and then "Manilla XC Open, 2007". (You may have to cut and paste the URL if it's not clickable).

Nicole