Rat Race 2014 Day 3 - A long hard flight.

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A long hard flight to Grants Pass and down to Donato


My second longest ever paragliding flight today - about 59km. Probably one of the hardest flights ever, and my tiredness caused me to get conservative at the end and potentially give away 8 places in the competition today!

Approaching the Start Gaggle

There was a lot of excitement before the start as our race weather gurus were calling it a classic Woodrat pre-frontal day. The start gaggle moved around a lot searching for the best lift. I gave up following them and decided to fly my own race, meaning I started a good ten minutes after the gaggle took off.

The first twenty km were brutal - pushing speedbar the whole time into wind along a ridgeline that gets wind from both sides, leading to turbulence, ratty thermals and alternating headwind, side winds. In theory the convergence line would have made a slightly different line better. Eventually I made it up to the Grants pass turnpoint, and was grateful to turn around and go downwind.


I-5 in the distance at the Grants Pass turnpoint

Unfortunately the winds were so switchy I ended up fighting a few kms into a headwind on the way back. Pilots were high all over the place and eventually I was able to get up to to few clouds dotting the course line on the way back.

Halfway back high about the forested ridgeline. Wind sweeps up both sides of this ridge leading to convergence and powerful thermals. I'm heading for the cloud in the middle. Eventual landing is the valley to the left in the distance

After passing launch again, I headed west out in the Medford valley just like yesterday. There were both sprint and race pilots dotted around. Interestingly, I flew with a few Sprint pilots a few times and realized how much my flying and especially thermalling has improved relative to some of these less experienced pilots.

Heading West out to the Cemetary turnpoint at the end of the ridge in the foreground

The leg downwind to Donato was not as easy as yesterday. The sky was filling in with hazy high altitude clouds, shutting down the thermals. I did get one pretty low save scratching low in a farmland bowl with a forested hillside directing the wind upwards. The climb started excruciatingly slowly, but improved once the thermal released from the hilltop. Classic thermal theory in action.

Now I'd been flying three hours, was still at 6000ft, but had to take into account an airspace restriction for the approach to Medford airport. For 5km of the course, we had to stay lower than 6000ft. As it turned out, the thermals all switch off as I passed through the start of the restriction,  and people were landing or getting very low all over the place.

I made a poor decision right at the end, opting to fly a little inland where two other pilots were climbing, rather than just drifting out towards the I-5 freeway, houses, and other civilization. I missed their climb out, but there were a group of pilots all in the same field, so I decided to go join them.That decision to take less risk probably cost me 8 places in todays result, but never mind....Safety first.


Hanging out for retreive