Bassano 2007, task 2

We woke up to a grey and cloudy morning, and it seemed we would get a marginal day if we got in a task before overdevelopment and rain. At takeoff it seemed to be better, and we got a 90 km task, similar to yesterday, with start at the observatory at Possagnio, west on the ridge and back to Assolo out on the plains before goal.

As the first pilots got off it was clear it would be a quite good day, thermals were quite good and much smoother than yesterday. I took off quite early and soon found myself boating around in cloudbase for 30 minutes, waiting for the start time at 13:20. I got a OK start, and took it quite easy in the beginning of the task, to stay high and safe. The area from Rubbio takeoff to the second TP is quite challenging as the ground is high, and there are no good landing options unless you land up on the plateau, and with todays 1500 meter cloudbase you only have a few hundred meters to play with.

At Rubbio we also met the paragliding gaggle, when they were crossing our courseline. 100+ paragliders and 15 hanggliders in the same thermal was quite interesting, but not very amusing, so I left just before the gaggles met, gliding out to clearer air… Dag Ring stayed behind and got up in a good core between all the paragliders.

Gliding out into the valley towards the second TP I realized I had made an error when putting today’s task into the GPS as I had yesterdays TP as the second TP. I saw 5 other gliders turn around behind me at exactly the same spot over a huge factory, this is a good indication that something is wrong, I realized what happened, turned back and aimed for the same spot crossing back towards the ridge.

From the second TP I started to speed up more, and got back to the main area without much drama, and leaving the gaggle behind at Rubbio takeoff when I cored up a nice 4 m/s. I did not remember the name of the last turnpoint or goal in the GPS, so I had to fly on the other pilots hoping they knew where to go, going out into the flats. I joined up with Corinna in a slow themal before gliding towards the last TP, and we had a reasonably good glide from the TP. My instrument did not help since I did not show where to go, so I lost some time thermalling 5-6 km before goal and came in with 300 meters to spare.

Olav did well close to a top 10 finish, Nils Åge was second from our team, me third, Dag fourth and Speidern fifth. Ove landed in goal without taking the last TP, Stefan landed close to the second TP. Robert Reisinger won the day.