It has been a hectic 3 days, hence this being the first report form these champs.
We are experiencing very varied wind conditions, from almost dead to hitting the category limit of 8m/s. So a lot of ballast is being used. And the wind speed changes can happen quickly. You could start a group with light wind needing no ballast and half way through it picks up so much that you need 100g of ballast. For those that don’t know F3K, empty weight is usually 220g-250g, so adding 100g makes a significant flying weight difference. The max ballast I used today is 140g, adding over 50% to my flying weight.
A consequence of the high wind is large score spread since if you don’t get to the good air immediately after launch, it is tough to travel very far to find it. So, there is some luck involved. But, there is a lot of incredible skill on display.
Team GBR have had our ups and downs, all of us having rounds where we feel we could have done better, but equally rounds that we are very happy with our performance. We are all sitting roughly mid pack currently, with Corne the best of us in 31st.
I will leave you with a round report from yesterday:
Round 7 – One flight only in 10min working time.
Wind is still very strong.
Group 1 – Corne van Onselen
No one launched on the buzzer. Hard to make a call. Corne launched a couple of minutes into the round and went NE. He didn’t managed to get much lift and did about 1:30. The max time achieved was 3:11, so Corne scored 497 pts.
Group 2 – Michael Stern
Michael decided to fly his short nose, strong wing BAMF2 with 140g ballast, so 390g auw.
Everyone held on the ground for a long time. A few launched, but none did much. With a little over 5mins to go, He felt a bit of a lull in the wind and it started to rise again after about 15-20secs and a slight wind shift to the SE, his right, so launched, giving it everything to throw with a heavy glider. Air immediately felt good and he started circling and going up. There was another guy who got lift on the NW side and most launched that way. Michael was alone in his lift, climbing well and drifting back. After about 2mins, his air died, or he lost contact with it, but by then the other group had drifted back and towards him, so he cruised across to the W to join them and carried on climbing and made the remaining working time to achieve 5:12, the highest time of the group. Very happy with that! And got the 1000pts.
Group 6 – Gavin Stern
Miroslav from Slovakia was the only pilot to launch within the first 5 mins of the working time. He did really well to get 4:18 without any real lift. Skilfully working light bubbles to make that time.
Just after he landed, we felt a small lull in the wind and a slight pull to the NE. All the rest launched in the next 10secs. Gav felt light lift almost immediately, but it was not easy and drifted fairly fast downwind to the SSE. He was lowest at one point but flew really well to locate the stronger part of the lift and climb well. It required a lot of recentering. He was pretty much the highest at the end and flew 4:29, scoring 994!
