High an dry

After the rest day on Saturday we did not fly a task on Sunday. Instead we commerated Stefan Schmoker, the pilot who sadly died in an accident on Friday. We flew more or less straight from launch to Valle, with flowers which we dropped over the landing zone. In the evening there was also a mass in the main church.

Today it was back to normal again with a whoppy 97,4 k task, mainly in the flats but with a last leg over the Mesa back to Valle. Initially the conditions were quite turbulent but after the start thigs got better. There were fewer clouds today, and more interestingly, the thermals topped out at some 3700m later in the day; very high that is.
For whatever reason I suffered from influenza with fever last night and throughout the day. I decided to try to fly but very carefully, staying clear from the traffic around the start and also otherwise ensuring at least double the normal safety margins. It was definitely tiresome byt after a total of 4,5 hours of flying I landed in goal; needless to say very happy! My time of 3:34 is of course not very good, approx. an hour after the leaders, but goal is goal.
Teammates Ari and Jouni also made goal and quite a bit faster. Ari had early on a very clear lead and took a route back over Espina. Unfortunately for him the predicted notherlies higher up were not really there so he had to fight the normal southwesterlies for some 30 km. Needless to say that cost much time, but he finished approx. 40th. Everybody else took a more direct course, ove the flats and the smaller hills which worked quite reliably. Jouni flew conservatively and came into goal as 60th or so. All in all one of the better days for the team as a whole we expect to climb up in the team ranking a bit.

Tonight it will be an early night for all of us and hopefully we'll be fit to fight again tomorrow. We have four more tasks to improve our scores...

Today managed to upload my track in the local internet cafe. Some day we'll try to upload our tracks to the XContest.