Competition News

Hello and welcome to the reports for the last PWC in 2017 in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The Swiss team arrived in batches in town: While Stefan, Yael and Yanick arrived from Switzerland, Tim and Domi were already in Ecuador for kitesurfing, Franz Schilter came from Peru and I got here from Brazil.
Some information about the city. Guayaquil is the biggest city in Ecuador and is situated almost at the Pacific. In the bigger area of Guayaquil live more than 3 million people, from very rich to extremely poor. The takeoff is in the west of the city, 300m above sea level. Local pilots say that the flying is quite relaxt: usually not a lot of wind and the conditions are smooth. While Thursday seemed to be quite a good day with nice cloud base up to 1200m, yesterday was much less good. Stefan, Yael and I went to the take off at 12, but the sky was completely over casted. However, pilots were slowly climbing in front of the take off. Quite motivated the Swiss team took off to and tried to climb. But the climbs were very weak (+2m/s over a cement plant reported Steff, while most other climbs were less than 1m/s). In addition the thermals usually stopped at 600m. All in all it was not a good day and after 30min we decided to land and go back to the hotel. In the afternoon, Tim and Domi arrived and we went for a great lunch in town.
Today (Saturday) is the official training day. But as there is no sun out, Steff and I decided to cancel flying today. The rest of the team went to the take off, but until 12 there was no sun at all. Later the clouds disappeared and pilots reported from great flying conditions.
Registration was in the later afternoon, followed by the safety briefing.
This competition will be the first one that is supported by the new PWC app. That means You can now keep up with all the action on the new World Cup App which includes the entertaining live commentary, revamped tracking, leaderboard, pilot list and results. You can install it:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pwca.liveapp