4. Task: 82 km

Today was a more difficult day than we thought. At taskbriefing, no clouds, so we set 80km. Then we had higher clouds later on and wanted a longer task, possible overdevelopment let us go back to 82km though. When we started, the wind picked up and killed a lot of thermals for our startgate, I tried my best and nearly landed. I was so close to the ground, zipper of my harness open... but the field looked good, red rocky ground, and I was lucky once more - a very rough, dust devil type thermal was good enough to give me a few more meters, and step by step I moved a little higher.
How to get back to the 11km start radius though... I had to go back against headwind and was flushed again :( ok, then I remembered a grand friend of mine, Bertrand Piccard (who flew around the world in a balloon) - if you can´t go against the wind, go with it! So I did and headed out opposite direction to the start radius, completely off course, and it worked! Eventually I made the first point and took a big detour again to the second, detour for the third as well. After the third, I got low and had to land. I made about 56 km today on the task and probably flew 120 km to get there - but not many people got away at all today, so I am happy to have made a few more points on Kathleen. Won´t be many, because not many people even made the first turnpoint.
After my landing, when my parents had already found me, we enjoyed a fantastic aerobatics show - a guy with a high powered little plane came over and decided to make us all happy with some loopings, barrel rolls and low overpasses. We nearly jumped high enough to touch him. Whoever it was, thank you very much, you made our day!
From our team, nobody did the first turnpoint. I hope we did not loose too many points today in the team score.
We really need some nice flying conditions, so far it has been a very difficult meet. I so hope that we can fly a big task tomorrow - and I now some nice turnpoints out in the valleys I saw today ;)
On the photo (thanks to our team-doc Ecki!) Primoz Gricar from Slovenia, one of my best friends - he is 3rd in the rigid wing ranking at the moment and also a member of our Timezone team!