Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Crash and Burn

We had the most beautiful looking sky I have ever seen. I had a nice tow, got off, sniffed around a bit and found a boomer that took me to 9500 feet at 900 fpm. The wind was blowing about 40 degrees off the course line so I decided to head west around the edge of the start circle so I could just fly down wind once the clock started. I had another nice climb in the cool air at cloudbase and headed off to the west. Four of us picked a bad line that had us flying through air going down at 1300 fpm. I had enough of that and turned 90 degrees upwind hoping to fly out of the sink. Instead the sink continued until I was well under 2000 feet. I groveled around still sinking and finally landed about 13k west of the course line. I have never been so disappointed, upset, and just downright ticked off about landing. The perfect day for racing and I was on the ground outside the start circle. :-(

Luckily I fell out of the sky near a road and Belinda soon had be back to the campground so I could hide my head in shame! I ran into one of the British team doing laundry that was one of the other victims. Misery loves company! After looking at my flight records, it looks like I was crossing a strong sink line. I was probably most of the way across the line when I turned right which kept me right in the line. I never figured out what was going on until I was too low to recover. A hard earned lesson in flying tactics. I am not sure what I should have done differently. I will talk to some sky gods this evening and see if they have any advice.

Any hope of pushing my way into the 50s is gone; I'll be lucky if I am in the top 80 after today's antics.

The rest of Team USA made it into goal. I don't know how fast they were so I don't know how they placed. This is Dean's first trip to goal and he is very happy.

We have the presentation ceremony this evening and a party afterwards. Tomorrow Dean, Davis, Belinda, and I head to Mount Beauty for the Bogong Cup. The timing is perfect since tomorrow is supposed to be wet and stormy. It should be flyable again once the Bogong Cup gets underway.

I don't know what type of Internet access I will have there, but I will try to keep posting. I will also try to post some pictures of the sky I took this afternoon. Freakn' Awesome!

1 comment:

Ice Queen Elsa said...

Tom, tough luck on the last day. Stay upbeat and enjoy the Bogong cup. You will really enjoy the small town, decent cafes ands restaurants and the mountains! Be sure that Davis and Curt briefs the team on techniques for flying the valley from Mt. Emu and ways to get out of the valley; some days it works best to stay off the ridges.

Tell Dean congratulations on making goal.