Manilla Day 3

Had a wicked storm last night which blew my towel away, probably into the paddock where it has been thoroughly devoured by Godfrey's 8 goats. It seems the amazing lightning show off in the distance late in the evening moved a lot closer by about 1am. My radio and battery charger were out on the blacony and were sitting in a puddle when I found them in the morning. The battery charger exploded but the radio was fine, I fared better than James who after the excitement of the Weekend Warrior Weekend left his GPS and 5020 out in the storm...we are yet to find out if they lived.

Today shaped up as a classic Manilla XC day, some instability, some clouds and moderate SE winds had me imagining landing at sunset somewhere far away. It was windy on the hill and difficult to drift with some of the lighter climbs, but after half an hour of yo-yoing above launch, I hit 22oom and and headed towards Narrabri with Andrew Polidano flying his tandem a short distance behind. The drift away from launch was SE and ground speed was up to 60Km/h hand up so all was looking good for a long one. Clouds were forming around Mt Kaputar and further north but not accessible to us until we got much closer to Narrabri. It was relatively easy to stay high but it would have been much nicer to have a few clouds in our area. Andrew landed after about 20Km and I continued on flying north of the Boggabri gap and into the flat lands where I hoped I could speed up a bit. I left the last of the hills at 200om and lined up a row of nice brown paddocks about 10km long. I flew the entire length and only heard my sink alarm turn off once. I landed in a stubble field with zero groundspeed into wind as I descended, 50km from Borah. The wind was much further south after I hit the flats and I later heard that the Japanese all ended up flying north to the Horton valley after the wind becames southerly on launch, a much better direction. I ended up with the easiest retrieve imaginable from probably one of the most remote places I've ever landed around here, the farmer whose property I landed on drove me half way back to Manilla and then just as he was stopping to let me out, a ute came past and took me the rest of the way. Love the locals out here!