10 Januar 2012

Forbes Day 5: 217 km to Dunedoo

Is it possible to fly 217 km in the shade? It is, if you stay with the gaggle (I learnt that on my last two silly tries to fly on my own which did not work too well), and if you have a bunch of really top pilots. It was amazing how many thermals we found even though the first 100 km were shaded by high level clouds!
Only after our turnpoint we had more sun and more fun. But it was getting late, thermals weakened, so we had to grovel and take what we could find. I flew with Primoz for most of my flight and was happy to have such a good pilot with me. When I got to goal, I was amazed to see so many pilots already there. 27 pilots made goal! Big smiles there, happy faces. And the landing field was the nicest and biggest Ive seen in a competition so far. It was a lot of fun to end the big flight in style with a smooth landing.
I also flew with Christa for a while, and she is racing, it was great to see how determined she is to fly fast and get going! She is at her absolute best and finished 2nd in the womens score yesterday, which moved her up into 2nd place overall! Since I was the only woman at goal, I went back to 1st in the women´s ranking.
Roland, Hans and Jörg also made it to goal, showing a really strong and consistent performance here in Forbes. Only Lukas was unlucky and landed early, which moved him down from 2nd to 13th overall, now Hans is the top ranked German on 7th place.
We got back after midnight, at 0.30 in the morning, but as the forecast is for a really strong wind today, we might have another rest day before flying 3 more days. With 28 hours of airtime here in Australia so far, I already flew more hours than during my whole European season last year.

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