Australian PG Team

Kari reports again: Paragliding World Championships: Task 3

Today the forecast was for a more stable airmass, with light winds, higher cloud base and possible thunderstorms in the afternoon. The Task Committee sent us on a longer task of 118km.

The first 70km leg was an out and back in the mountains. The low cloud base and stable airmass made the jump back into the mountains at the start a bit of a scramble. When the start gate opened I was just high enough to go on glide with the main gaggle, but not in a good position.

I glided with my lower gaggle into the next peak and we came tearing around the corner to find high tension power lines between us and our nearest landing options. There's nothing quite like the feeling of desperation that comes from being in the midst of a sea of gliders in a slow stable airmass above powerlines with dodgy landing options. We seethed around and yelled at each other for about 15 minutes, until finally we surfed above the inversion and gained some altitude. This allowed us to move down to the windward end of the peak where we finally found a strong thermal above one of those amazing, enormous wooden crosses (how the heck they get those things up there is a mystery) and the climb boomed us up to cloud base.

We were already more than a thermal behind the higher gaggle who had come in above the inversion, skied out quickly and charged on. Gareth had also gotten slow somewhere and I caught up with him just before the first turn-point. We tagged it on different lines and turned for the 35km leg back towards launch.

The "possible thunderstorms" in the forecast were becoming a reality. Huge clouds with black bottoms (CuNims) were going nuclear and threatening to converge into super cells above the peaks on our route back. This was probably a logical point to consider quitting the race, instead I thought mostly about whether we still had time to weave our way back through before the sky fell out and charged on with my gaggle. I think I may have racing fever.

We stomped into the peaks under the massive clouds and all of a sudden the slow, shitty thermals were gone and strong lift was abundant. So were long, fabulously buoyant glides at cloudbase. As we approached the next peaks it started to rain and there was a hint of thunder. That brought us to our senses and we made a 90' turn to the right to sprint out from under the cloud. A couple of gliders were climbing out in the lee of a mountain out in the valley and we dived in, just in time to see a pilot hang himself up in the trees halfway up the hill....

That was task over for us - Gareth radioed the accident in and we spiralled down to help local emergency services with the rescue. The pilot turned out to be fine, which we found out after Gareth half killed himself running up the hill to find him. And the pilot managed to climb down from his 50m tree by himself, which was lucky because the local emergency services had no idea how to go about rescuing someone out of a tree.

The task was stopped in the end. Will post scores later. Let's hope Steve,Felipe and Pete had a better run today than we did!