Race Day task 4…Not one reached goal!

What a day it turned out to be. I was so rested and eager to fly well today to make up for the poor last couple of days. Got to launch pretty earlier around 9:15 and laid out wing , bundled up and went to relax. When they called the task it was a whooper, 82.5Km! Given the high pressure the previous day they must be expecting some nice weather today I thought.  Yeah baby!. A left turn day to boot..my preference! Lets get going. Powered up my gear and another gremlin strikes. All my waypoints from the Digifly had evaporated! There was only 20 minutes before the launch opened and then only 15minutes before the comp ranking launch order came into effect. What to do , what to do. I really only use the garmin gps for loggin my tracks not actually navigating. So I entered all  the waypoint coords of the task by hand. Sweet I thought. That wasn’t long. However, when I came to enter the route, the waypoints weren’t there. Crap! I deleted all the waypoints and entered them again. By this time the novice window had closed and i now had to wait for about 100 pilots to take off before I got to launch. Bummer. I was more worried that the thermals were going to get too strong to even launch but those thoughts were far from actuality. When my turn came there was no wind on launch at all!. Very Light. I watched a number of experienced pilots bring their wings up, overfly them and then they barreled down the hill.  It took 2 attempts before I could get off. By this time the gaggle had spread out but they were all very low. Looks like I hadn’t missed much. I climbed to about 9000 squeaking every bit of lift I could and headed to the Penon ( the rock  in the background pic above). There I spent the next 1hr 15 minutes trying to climb  out. I flew 15Km back and forth in front of that frickin rock today. John Mann and I looked as if we were trapped but somehow John managed to get a squeak more lift than me after I had turned and when I came back there was nada. there has to be a good way to soar this thing. Sure didn't work for me today. I was very conscious of flying to close to the rock cos if I took a collapse that turned me into the rock I would be toast. Thanks to all that Whidbey flying I was fine. However my race day was done again along with many others who landed out here. Those that did get up and go over the back didn't get as far as they wanted. Of course the comp pilots did well but it was a hard task. John Mann did really well getting further than Arun, Mer, Chris today! Nice job John!

On the up side I had a great trip back on the bus met a whole new bunch of folks and ht the tequila later in the afternoon to celebrate our sink out!\

Tomorrow is always another day!