What can I say about this flight? Challenging? Three tasks again, Pilot declared goal, fly in and judge declared goal. The winds looked very slow but the minimum distances were huge at about 5km from the fly in.
Due to the direction you could either go slow and low from the North east or go high and faster from the
Paul stuck with the high winds which in the end was the better bet in theory if you got it right. Unfortunately for both of us we both flew what we had badly. I was late taking off and Paul just had some bad luck on his approach the the Fly in.
I ran out of time on my PDG and ended up dropping 830m before it then flew past it on the way to the fly in. The fly in was interesting because we were slipping off to the north of the scoring area and had to go high to get some movement to the south. At about the same time Paul was dropping in from above on the North westerly wind but came in too soon. Next thing both of us are back up at 3000 ft making a correction.
As the clock counted down, I got held up in my descent by a “standard” balloon that was underneath me descending at a bout 900ft/min. I could not get off the top of him to speed up and make my approach down low. I estimate it wasted 100m of distance away from where I wanted/intended to be.
The end result? At maybe 50m form the edge of the scoring area and too far to throw the marker, the time ran out and so a no result for me. Paul also had to throw but missed the scoring area by 2m. No result for him too.
If there is good news it is that only a hand full of balloons got into the scoring area. Most were well off to the North trying to get south still. With so many outside the group B score will be very high.
Onto the JDG (back to 3000ft) and the real fun begins. The task sheet called for a 100m scoring area around the target. It was looking very much like time and direction were against us and that no one was going to get there.
We got within 550m and there was some discussion because Paul thought that he had cancelled the scoring area. As a precaution we dropped our markers but it was no good. The scoring area was in force and only one person made it in.
