Competition News

Today more south wind was predicted and we went to another takeoff which was better suited for the southerly winds. Unfortunately the burned down the whole hill and everything was covered with ashes. The organization did everything they could to get the takeoff as clean as possible and sent a few helpers a day before in order to get the takeoff ready for us. We arrived to a properly cleaned starting area where they have also tried to cover as much of the area as possible with plastic covers.
The wind was strong and the takeoff itself relatively small (only two gliders at the time were able to prepare for taking off). Therefore the starting procedure took quite some time and also because there were many aborted starts.
Once in the air, the lifts were much weaker then the days before, and we had to take 3m/s thermals to go up to cloud base. We have never had really nice clouds the days before, but today they were forming quite nicely on the task line. As it is very dusty in the air, it sometimes was hard to tell if you are flying in the dust or already in the clouds.
The first TP was set around 10km to the southeast, before turning back, flying over Panchgani and crossing the lake to the north in order to reach TP2. After that, a 40km leg to the south was set, before landing in goal.
During the start, there were two groups. Unfortunately almost all the swiss guys, were in the left group, which was the worse decision. Benjamin was on the right side as well together with me. We had a quite good line going in to the south and back direction Panchgani. After tacking the second turnpoint in the Nortch, Michael Sigel, who started on the left side, slowly managed to catch up and eventually made it back in to the leading group together with me, just in time to cross the flats. It was a long glide, where we did not cross one thermal. Fortunately we arrived with a good amount of altitude on the other side and managed to catch a good lift which got us high enough to start the 15km final glide. We were pushing full bar throughout the whole 15km and arrived 20 seconds behind the first pilot (which unfortunately has a slightly faster glider). Benjamin arrived only 1:45 minutes later with a very good result as well.
The other swisspilots unfortunately were not able to catch up and started struggeling with weaker climbs behind us and lost a bit of time to the leaders.
In the overall ranking it is now very tight with the top three only separated by 5 points. It looks like we are able to fly 7/7 tasks, so there are still 3 tasks to go. Michael Sigel is looking really strong with scoring over 980pts in every task so far and is the only one in the top 3 with no discard.
Positions overall after 4 tasks:
1. Dominik Breitinger
2. Austin Cox
3. Michael Sigel
12. Noé Court
25. Jean Morisetti
26. Tim Bollinger