We woke up to clear blue skies, and what seemed to be a beautiful day for flying. After breakfast at 9 it started developing clouds, even if the inversion in the valley was strong and reducing the thermal activity in the early hours.

This mushroom grew behind takeoff early in the morning, a clear sign of a unstable day.

We had a briefing after setting up under building clouds, the meteo guy used the phraze “extremely dangerous conditions”, and the day was quickly cancelled for safety reasons. There was a sigh of relief in the pilot crowd when it was clear we would not have to fly a task, it was not a good comp day.

We had time to fly down before the storms hit, and it was a nice flight in super smooth air over the valley. I filmed and took some pictures before landing and packing up just in time to escape the rain.

Quite a few interesting landings, It seemed like half the pilots got tailwind gliding over the landing field at the camping site. Mo major breakage, but quite a few green nosecones.

View to the west of the valley, the Cu-Nimbus is growing.

The weather improved a little, and we woke up above cloudbase with a clear blue sky. The cloudbase lifted during the morning, and we got a 105 km task. The forecast was for overdevelopment in the afternoon. I took off early, and mucked around in cloudbase taking photos and enjoying the air. I was actually too relaxed, and did not pay attention to the clock. When the first start gate was getting close I had to fly back outside the 8km start cylinder, I ended up in the rain from the collapsing clouds, and lost a lot of altitude with a wet glider. I got slowly up and took the second start gate, most of the gagle took the first start gate, and I met them coming back from the first TP.

Bjørn Joakimsen and me together after the first TP.

The conditions were difficult with the low cloudbase and collapsing clouds, there was OK lift, but it was very broken and quite turbulent if you got below the peaks.

I was stressed, unhappy about my bad start, and did not fly well at all. I made a OK valley crossing, but lost the first thermal when I came over the next ridge. I lost it there, got too impatient and demotivated, and flew along the ridge getting lower and lower and more and more turbulence. Landed about 10 km from the second TP, about halfway through the task. It was overdeveloping rapidly, and the first lightning came just after I had landed.

The task was stopped at 16:10 due to thunder and rainstorms on the course. Speidern made it to goal, but not before the task was stopped. Bjørn Joakimsen landed 10 km behind me, and Olav Lien Olsen in the same area as Bjørn.

My landing field, nice clouds over the ridge in the background, but it was shitty below the peaks.

Powerful clouds a few minutes later…

Forecast for tomorrow is unstable and rain, we might get a short and early task in if we are lucky.

First day was cancelled around noon due to rain and low cloudbase. We had ofcourse set up and had the first showers soak us and our gliders. Most pilots tried to glide down between the showers, I packed up and went to the hotel to work and do some emails. Long term forecast look bleak to say the least…

I really hope the forecast gets this wrong.

The most annoying thing about days like this is to have to go through all the motions, briefing, driving up, setting up, and waiting half the day in rain before we finally can give up. Feels like wasting away days for nothing.

Most pilots are here, Seppi is missing from the Austrian team, and Olli pulled out from the German team. Oleg still hangs in there, and showed up there to fly the comp. Scott from Australia is here, but was not allowed into the competition because it was full and we have very limited space on takeoff.

The organization seems OK so far, with a chaotic but nice opening seremony last night. No parade in the streets due to the rain, everything was indoors, with a local drum band and kids from the local primary school entertaining us.

There will be a sprog-measurements talk this afternoon by Dennis Pagen and Gerolf will probably have a few words to say too :-)