Rat Race Task 1

June 17th

Rat Race Day 1
I think you'd agree if you bred a wookie and a great ape you'd end up with a pretty strange beast. Today I'm pretty sure I know the noise that animal would make if you sprayed it with mace and stuck it with a branding iron. It's exactly the same noise that hawaiian paraglider pilots make at 1.30am the day after they hit the mainland. Other people told me (I was far too scared and far too attempting sleep) it also involved some rolling in the dirt and the kind of intimate touching normally reserved for rugby league players. Apparently this is part of the process of adjusting to having so much land around.

Today dawned sunny and the forecast was mostly light and variable with some high pressure moving in after yesterdays cold front. Very taskable so we were quickly in the big yellow school bus and up the hill. With some possible stronger wind in the afternoon, a relatively short task was called - thirty six km including several turn points around launch and a seventeen km final glide up a valley to the west. The wind tech's were staying high so I launched early to avoid the rush and then spent an hour hanging around in some really rowdy thermals waiting for the start gate to open. Before we'd even headed for the start gate, there was a reserve deployment in the gaggle over launch. The pilot drifted in the small but very strong cores while half the. field flew large circles around him. He landed OK. The task was fast with the same strong, tight lift around the course. The comparison has been made already but I have to say how much this place is like bright - for those who know, in shape and size, todays task could easily have been Mystic-Porepunkah-Mystic-Apex-Clearspot-Harrietville. The glide away from Wood Rat mountain towards goal on the last leg is about as close as you could get to gliding from clear spot to the burrs - except unlike the burrs we got up at the end of the glide ;-)
Goal was a busy little paddock with more than forty pilots in. Heike, James and I all made goal with James in first. It was also fairly exciting with one pilot throwing a reserve and missing goal by two hundred metres and another two just scraping in - one did very well to get there just bubbling over the tall trees on the course line side of the goal paddock then completely misjudged his final turn and collected a pine tree with his left wing on downwind leg. He said he wasn't sore but I'm sure the adrenalin was still pumping. Another flew into the field downwind between two pine trees, pulling a feet up cross-tail landing to rapturous applause. In a competition where the philosophy is to introduce pilots to competing, I guess it isn't quite right to applaud an act of such stupidity, but when someone so blatantly disregards their physical well-being for the entertainment of all, you have to let it all out. Especially considering the pilot was in the goal cylinder without the attempted tree hugging.

It was a great start to the comp with heaps of smiling faces which is what it is all about. Results at www.vip2comp.com