Results can be found at;
http://www.moyes.com.au/Forbes2009/Results/Results.aspx

The carnage on the first day seemed to never end, Olav’s glider was fine after replacing one upright, but he was then attacked by an eagle while flying the task. The eagle tore holes in the top surface of his sail with its claws. Steve Moyes had a bad landing, and hurt his finger, so he could not fly anymore, that was lucky for me as I could get parts from Steve’s glider to repair mine.

I wanted to get off the ground as soon as possible yesterday, but there were still some small things to do on the glider, so I had to wait a bit for the tow again. I was having a headache, and felt nausea from being dehydrated working on the glider in the morning. I drunk at least 3 liters before takeoff, so it would help during the flight, but I still felt sick and had to take it easy during the flight.

On course I teamed up with Lucas Bader and Phil Schroeder for a while, but I lost Lucas from sight when we went on glide again. I later heard he went a little left behind me, and got a new 5 m/s thermal and could start the final glide from there, while I had to take one more thermal.

I did get a OK time, despite taking it easy. We get penalized for taking the last start gate.

Briefing is in 3 minutes now, looks like a good day again today.

Short report today, I’m dead tired from a long day.

Worked from 07:30 to 11:00 fixing the glider, got quite dehydrated in the sun. We got a 103km task, quite windy in the morning. Got off OK once the wind died down a bit, and got up. Took the last start gate, and flew to goal. Nice but turbulent day, clouds, crosswind task, cloudbase at 2800m.

More tomorrow

Today looked like a good day, we got a 187km task via one TP. The forecast was for some clouds and base at around 2200 meters.

We all set up at the airstrip, and got ready to go. The towing did not go very fast, and my line seemed to be the slowest one. Olav Lien was 2 gliders in front of me. As we slowly moved forward towards the takeoff line a dustdevil started forming just in front of us. Within a second it was huge and picked up a Nic that was lying down on the dolly ready to go. He was lucky and had the dolly runners to help him and hold him down, but when the dustdevil came to us there was no one to help.

We were all clipped in and ready to go, and got slammed around pretty good. The American pilot in front of me was lifted a meter up, and dumped down on his back 6-7 meters away from where he stood. Olav was flipped over on his back, and broke one upright on the glider. I managed to hold the glider down on the nose for a while, but eventually was flipped over on the back. The Australian pilot behind me also got flipped over, and his leading edge hit my glider and broke my outboard leadingedge, sprog, and one batten. The broken sprog also made a nice hole in the undersurface, in addition to the scars in the leadingedge from flipping over. My instrument mount was also cracked, but I might be able to fix that with some epoxy.

A total of 6 gliders were damaged. I do not know if we get the parts yet. In addition to the carnage caused by the dustdevil, one Russian pilot tumbled on his Combat while thermalling up over the airfiled, and came down under rescue chute. Another pilot flipped over on the dolly under takeoff and had to be airlifted out to hospital. He’s was not badly injured as far as I know.

I gave one of my uprights to Olav so he could fly, and he took off again later, but I do not know if he attempted the task yet. He was at least 1:30 behind the last start time.

So not a good start on this competition for me, I could not fly the task, and need lots of repairs to my glider. There was nothing we could do to avoid the dustdevil, but it’s a bit silly to have to stay in the line hooked in for a long time in these conditions. We should be able to tie down the gliders, and just go straight into the takeoff line to minimize the risk of dustdevils.

I flew Oslo – London in the morning, and had to wait 7 hours at Heathrow for my flight to Sydney. Not too bad, I found a good book and a quiet pub, so time went by quickly at the airport. I could not sleep on the flight from London to Sydney at all, so that flight felt like it took forever.

Olav have been in Sydney a few days, so he picked me up at the airport and we drove straight from Sydney to Forbes. It’s a 4 hour drive, and we arrived hoping to have a short flight on the new gliders, but it was way too windy to fly. So I tried to sleep a few hours, before having dinner. We met Nic from Switzerland and teamed up with him as he was alone but had a driver and a big car. So we’re all set for the comp.

The weather here is sunny and warm, it was 34 degrees yesterday, but it might be windy the next few days. Looks like there will be around 80 pilots in the comp, many are already here, and the rest will arrive today.

Going to bed at 22, I quickly fell asleep, but woke up again at 03 hungry for dinner, and could not sleep more. Jetlag sucks…

We will go out to the airfield again today, and I really hope we can get a few flights in today to get a little bit used to towing and thermals again before the comp starts.