Canadian Nationals Day 4

Task 3

An American person asked me a few weeks ago if anyone in Australia other than Steve Irwin actually used the word ‘crikey’. I said that I didn’t but there were definitely people who’d never been on TV that did. This occurred to me while I was puzzling over how to describe today’s flying conditions, and the only single word I could come up with that generally did the job was: Crikey! Read on if you dare…

Competition organisers always want to set a long task when they can, and today was that day. We had a 109km race to the south with goal at Invermere. All the Aussies were in goal and a total of 33 pilots flew the distance and another 5 went over 100km. In a field of 65 that’s fairly impressive. Results were:

1 – Marty Devietti, USA – 3:52:05
7 – James Thompson - 4:05:01
8 – Gav Zahner
28 – Heike Hamann
31 – Me

Looking south towards Invermere, about 50Km from goal.

What was more impressive about having 33 pilots in goal on a relatively slow, 109km task is that so many survived the psychological beating that the day handed out. My flight today was about 5.5hours, I’ve had several flights longer than this and all are tiring but today after 2 hours I was as mentally exhausted as I’ve ever been in flight. The ridges here are big, so big that you don’t need to be on top of them to fly a very long way, Will keeps telling us this – fly the front, it works – he knows better than anyone and he’s absolutely right. The drawback is that flying the front of the ridge seems to be the paragliding equivalent of going 10 rounds with Mike Tyson – except that you get your face smashed in the first round and then Mike spends the next 9 rounds shadow boxing you so you don’t know when or if that knockout blow is coming. Seriously, I wish I was exaggerating here. I’ve flown a lot of places now and absolutely none are even close to the commitment required to fly here. It’s not exactly difficult flying you understand, every single spur you fly over will have lift on it somewhere so you shouldn’t really sink out (most of the time) but the hard part is dealing with the mind-job you get handed every single time you fly into a thermal. It goes something like this:

You’re gliding along the face of a 2500m ridge and you approach a spur running up to a peak. You feel the usual turbulence associated with impending lift, then you almost instantly hit a peak of 5m/s. Your glider pitches behind you and you have that hands-up-and-wait moment, you catch the massive surge then just as quickly you are doing zero or less. You fly for a couple seconds, trying to gather your wits when your glider spontaneously shoots out to the horizon away from the ridge for no apparent reason. You mentally scan your underpants for fallout as you swing under the glider and somehow fly into a solid core where given all you’ve learnt in the last 15 seconds there should only be sink. The climb seems good, solid 4-5 up so you fly straight and consolidate in it for 3 or 4 seconds, the lift peaks so you turn a sharp180 degrees to the right, and you are in still air. No problem you think, it didn’t feel like it but the centre of lift must be to the left, so you continue the turn through 360, find the thermal again, consolidate in it, turn left, and you are doing 3m/s down. Your glider goes behind you to what feels like the horizon but the vario doesn’t make a sound. You check your undies again and prepare to be smacked out of the sky. Nothing happens. You keep turning, out of sheer terror now and repeat this pitching, rolling aerial rodeo ride and the end result is a series of eclectic 360 degree turns about as round as a kidney-dish that get you an average of 1-2m/s (most of the time averaging up, though occasionally it’s down and occasionally that’s better than the alternative). Every now and then you put the wingtip on the horizon, deliberately rather than by act of god and you turn the 5/ms sliver of lift into a 2m/s average. This is bliss when you can manage it. After 10 minutes of the above, you arrive somewhere near or just above ridge height and you head on a glide wondering what the hell just happened to you and exactly where your mummy is right now. With many sadistic variations on the above theme, you repeat this every time you hit lift for the next 5 hours.

The flying here is truly awesome – and I mean that in the oxford dictionary sense not the bastardized skateboarder sense. It took me almost 2 hours to fly the first 30km and my nerves were destroyed by that point. I somehow managed to get the shits (literally, sorry) a couple hours before the task started so I launched late and didn’t leave the start gate until half an hour after the start time. Combined with the first 2 hour struggle it was looking marginal that I would make goal by the 8pm close time but there just seemed to be no way to make up time while staying in the air AND not having a nervous breakdown. With 45 minutes until goal closed I was 25km out at 3400m, my GPS was telling me I needed a 9 to 1 glide and my time to goal was 43 minutes. Nothing left to do but glide – and pray. I made 2 turns in one strong climb and flew through what little else there was. I got to goal 6 minutes before close with about 50m of ‘spare’ altitude when I crossed the goal line. Very exciting. Gavin and James were both in fast, Gavin might have been much faster had he not broken his speed bar 30K from the start.

The positive I take out of the day is that I had a 109km flight that would never have happened if this wasn’t a comp day. At about 30km I would have said ‘This is pretty dumb’ and flown into the valley and landed, rather than saying ‘This is pretty dumb’ and continuing because it was a comp task. I like that comp flying encourages you to stretch your limits and today was a classic example of that….but if anyone or anything that has the power is listening out there, can we please have one, nice, consistent smooth thermal that goes up all the way around? Just one?? Thanks.

Heading on an optimistic final glide...