I’ve added some pictures from Frya Cup in the album, and all the pics from the Worlds should also be there now since someone very persuasive asked me to put it online yesterday :-) I’ve not sorted or annotated the worlds pics, that will take a while…
Ringerudkollen
I had to work Thursday and Friday, so I had to skip the planned Acro course in Voss. It was overdeveloping Saturday so no flying, but the weather cleared up and I went for a bike ride around Oslo instead.
Sunday looked very promising, I was up at 8:00 to get ready to go to Ringerudkollen early and if possible fly some XC southwest. Erik Vermaas called to get a ride since his car broke down yesterday on the way out to go flying. We met Bjørn and Erling at the landing, and went up to takeoff. It was unusually calm, the CU’s were building high around us, but no thermal activity where we were getting ready.
Erik took off after some paragliders were able to soar at takeoff height. I waited for 20 more minutes until a few paragliders were climbing good over the south takeoff. I took off straight into the thermal, and quickly climbed out over takoff, but it stopped at about 1000 meters. The conditions were strange, and even if there was no wind the cores were easily lost. I sunk back down to takeoff again before getting up together with Bjørn and Erik to 1300 meters. Since we had no permission to go higher into the TMA, any serious XC was out of the question. It’s not possible to cross the mountain over to Sokna with only 1370 meters under the TMA. We flew down the ridge, in nice smooth conditions, and landed at a small airstrip in a field. Egil and Erling had to wait in crosswind for a while, and Erling joined Bjørn and me at the airstrip later while Egil probably flew home.
Erik and I had meatballs, coffe and icecream at Vik to finish of a good flying day. The summer is here now, it was shorts and t-shirt temperatures all day.
Frya Cup 2004
We got some good days flying this weekend at Frya. Hedemarken hanggliderklubb made a well arranged competition, and I think everyone had a good weekend. I drove up on Friday afternoon and met Robin at takeoff. It was clouded, but the sun broke through as we got ready, and I got a 20 minute flight thermalling in marginal conditions. Robin had his trike ready at the Airstrip, I had the towing rope in my harness and landed on the airstrip. Robin towed me up three times so I could play a little with the setup of the glider between each flight to feel the difference.
New look, new software
I’ve been running the same look on this site for quite some years now. The gray/blue theme was something I started with way back in 1998 for the first static pages I made on my old ISP’s homepages, but I lost those pages in a harddisk chrash.
In 1999 I got my own linux server online, and used a cgi script called newspro for updating. This was acually an early weblog (blog) script, looong before the hype about blogging started, and worked well for many years.
Weekend in Vågå
Originally the weekend plan was to have an aerotowing meet at Kongsvinger, but the grass strip was still to wet after snow melting. We moved the meet to Vågå since the forecast was good for Saturday. In the morning we did a briefing where we discussed the possible tasks and the best way of solving it. The weather looked fantastic, but a warm front came in from the west at very high speed. I had to wait for Nils Åge to get up to takeoff, and the front was already shading the area at 13:00, we got off but I could not get up after taking the start TP. The pre-fontal wind picked up and with the ground totally shaded for almost 2 hours the conditions were too weak.
We had a hope the front would pass. but it rained cats and dogs all sunday and have not stopped yet.
Weekend report
The weather deamons scored 3-0 last weekend on Frya. Fredrik and I drove to get some flying under a grey sky. We arrived at takeoff just as Sven took off. The conditions were OK, with some turbulence caused by wind shear. As we started to set up the rain came in. So we took lunch instead. After lunch it cleared, and we started setting up again as the rest of the guys took off and got high. Just as we were getting ready the wave conditions set up and we got gusts at 20 m/s on the ramp. Quite unflyable. The pilots in the air got smooth wave soaring above 1500 meters, below it was turbulent and shitty. Trond “Hangman” made over 3100 meters in the wave. We packed up the gliders again, and went to meet Olav on his way home from Italy. Late at night it seemed calm again, and I really wanted to fly so I started to set up again in very nice conditions. Guess what happened as I put in the last battens… Yep, the wave hit takeoff again and the wind almost broke the trees. We drove home desillusioned and sad, decided it was not going to be flyable on Sunday no matter what. On Sunday lots of pilots got good flights of course…
This weekend we have a National team meeting in Vågå, I will go there tomorrow after work and mabye get a late flight from Vole. The weather forecast is very good for Saturday at least.
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Picture
Fredrik sendt this picture of me at Rubbio takeoff the first comp day.
Easter and more
Sorry for the lack of updates, the Italian GSM networks still suck, so I could not connect to the internet easily. I’ve talked to Lolita at Tilly’s, and volunteered to help her set up a wireless internet zone in the hotel next year, that will make it much easier to get on the net.
This Easter has been the worst I’ve had since 1998, the weather was really bad with snowstorms while we waited in Germany, and in Bassano it was raining a lot. Most of the pilots went home early because of the bad weather, but the last few days were better.
Continue reading Easter and more
Bassano, Day 1 and 2
A quick update, more later.
We arrived in Bassano at 04:30, did not get into the hotel and spent the night in the car. Weather was OK, so we got a 70 km task with some overdevelopment around the course. My glider had a nasty right spiral, too much to handle for me after no real flying since the world. I gave up flying the task, and just flew back to the main landing to adjust the glider and fly one more flight at night to try to get it more straight. It’s better now, still need some tuning.
Today is gray, some rain, and no comp.
Waiting in Übersee
We arrived in Garmish after about 18 hours on the road through Sweden, Denmark and Germany. Very good test for the road navigation part of the GPSMAP 60CS, it performed very good, and gave us directions all the way to the parking lot outside the expo in Garmish.
The free flight expo 2004 was nice, lots of stuff on display, but no really big news for me. The hangglider makers seemed to focus on the beginner and intermediate marked, the only racing glider on display was the new Moyes Litespeed S with a “smoke” sail. I picked up a new licence of CompeGPS, and talked to the programmers about the features regarding the competition version of the program, the next version will include all RACE parts so we can score a comp with just CompeGPS, very nice! The new CompeGPS version has a really nice 3D engine, it was really impressive to see with good satelite photos as maps.
We spent the night in Küssen, and drove to Skyline in Übersee to arrange picking up our gliders from the airport in München, and I also needed to pick up a new harness as Moyes did not make mine in time to send to with the glider. Around noon we got the bad news that the gliders were not in München after all, but probably on a truck somwhere on the road from Amsterdam. If we are lucky they will arrive tomorrow… Crap, but not totally unexpected.
I spend the day fitting parachute and adjusting my new Skyline Zero Drag Racer harness, I bought one of the demo harnesses from the Skyline stand at the expo so I had something to fly with until my Moyes Matrix arrive. The Skyline fitted me nicely, and it seemed very nice and smooth. I’ll see after a few hours in the air with it, maybe I’ll be happy with it so I’ll cancel the Moyes Matrix. I also got a instrument pod for the Brauniger Compeo, to make it more practical to have on the basebar.
All we can do now is wait and see if we get some gliders tomorrow afternoon, if not we have to get them on Wednesday, and drive straight to Bassano. Probably we will have do the first flight with the new gliders the first competition day, which really sucks… But nothing we can do now…