After several rest days we started getting ready for the World Championships. The campground is now completely full of pilots…so every morning it is pilots getting their stuff ready, and then the campground completely empties out for the rest of the day. For this event our retrieve driver is David Menzie, one of the owners of the campground. A local who knows all the back roads and has his own 4x4 vehicle to find us. As a surprise to us, David went out one day and decorated up the retrieve vehicle with sticker-banners: a big “Team Canada” on the front windshield, and a Canadian flag decal and our 3 names on both sides of the vehicle. Very smart-looking, and we were touched by his thoughtfulness (he’s also wearing the Vancouver Canucks cap I brought for him, he’s a fan). He’s totally into being the Canadian Team driver for this event, thanks Dave! Pics of the vehicle are on http://mclearn.ca/gallery/. After the other countries saw what our vehicle looked like, they copied us by putting flags etc on their retrieve vehicles, but I think ours is still the best!
My brother and his girlfriend came up from Sydney to cheer us on and be our groupies. At the opening ceremonies we started with a Parade of Nations down the main street of Manilla to the showgrounds, and then an airshow over the showgrounds with a variety of aircraft, and then the official FAI speeches, and finally a fireworks show. Estimated cost of the whole event was something like $400,000 (probably a large part of that was getting the fighterjets to come overhead and do aerial manoeuvres for the crowd).
This morning there were some clouds already developing at 8am, so I was thinking it would get big and OD later on. But after the team leader briefings (which will happen every morning, where issues like rules, protests, scores, and general bitching by some nations will happen; eg. today it was the issue with FAI not allowing the extra spots that are available to be given out, since the pilots wanting those spots were not registered by the deadline, but they couldn’t register unless they were allowed in by FAI, kinda like the chicken and egg) we went up the mountain.
Up on launch it was pretty busy with all the spectators, officials, news people, pilots, and support staff, but the organization is excellent and everything was clearly signed and people knew where to park, where to lay out gliders, where to find food, and where to watch. Godfrey has put an enormous amount of effort into this so far and it shows in the quality of the organization.
Task committee is Kari Castle, Steve Ham, and Craig Collins. Safety committee is Adrian Thomas, Brian Webb, and Andrew Horchner. The task for today was a short 48 km triangle-type task, to the SW, then the E over town, and back to Godfrey’s for the goal field (which was slated to be an actual physical line, rather than a virtual line or a virtual goal cylinder, so you actually had to fly over a line on the ground to make goal). After the task was announced everyone got ready, but the sky was looking big and after a few minutes of everyone standing around in their gear (cooking in the heat), the safety committee decided to cancel the day due to the extremely big development around, and the 3 rain cells that were visible all around the mountain (and they weren’t just in one direction, but all around us, so it was pretty obvious the conditions were getting worse and worse). Most of us were pretty glad to see the safety committee doing their job and keeping us safe, although there weren’t many pilots actually laid out waiting for the window to open (which usually happens at a comp, this time the launch was virtually empty as the launch window start time approached).
So the first day was cancelled, but we got to get our electronics sorted out, get mentally psyched, and basically do a dry run. So tomorrow if the task goes ahead (whatever that may be) we’ll be ready for it!
Pictures are at http://mclearn.ca/gallery/ and click on “World Paragliding Championships, Manilla 2007”.
Nicole
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