Competition News

The said today was a good day, with south east wind, turning to south and weakening. As soon as we got airborne, we could enjoy very nice lifts up to 5m/s. waiting for the start was easy as it was lifting everywhere. Steph took a different option further in front of the takeoff which looked also pretty good, but without cloud so it was difficult to reach him. Then we headed up towards south east, and a massive convergence was all along the way. it was easy by then, just sometimes hard to keep full gas because of strongs lifts (6m/s). We took Tp 1 high and were ready to cross the valley, hoping not to end in the north side which was in the lee. We hit tp 2 and went a bit further in the cylinder to catch the thermal which was generating a nice cloud. Some of the leaders turned directly at the Tp and went back to the ridge on which we were before, Tim and Christophe took this option also. The others of us stayed on the optimized line as there were cumulus on the way. Then we crossed towards Tp 3 above the take off ridge and then I started to have doubts as there were no clouds in the flats behind. I had a very good line and could stay above the whole gaggle. it's started to be really tricky then, thermals in the flats were really weak and we had strong headwind, which wasn't planned at all. We all ended in survival mode drifting away from Tp 3. I couldn't unfortunately stay in a good position, as I was too careful, didn't want to push in the wind wall and to end up stuck. Slowly, I ended up catching the Turnpoint and again instead of coming back in the same thermal we had I was thermalling a bit more north and finally had to go back to the same thermal. It really felt like cross country in Brasil by then, taking everything to gain every possible meter. Finally above the last hills before the flats of Nis, we had 10km final glide with 12 glide to goal. Fortunately it was lifty and I got to goal easily. I've never seen such a contrast of conditions in any tasks I flew before. Crazy! Tomorrow is another day and hopefully a better day for the Swiss team.