Something fresh for my 901st flight: video blogging! A perfect slow day, a magnificent task. And a shitty mike. You may grab a bit of english gibberish with imperceptible parts in french. I am so pissed off the sound did not work. You could shut it down as well. Anyway, I uploaded the videos below, that is for the souvenir, and for the pictures. The point today was about patience, staying airborne, changing gears when possible, and making it to goal before the task deadline. Which I did for 25 mere seconds… Luca wins the day with Stefan and Joachim close-by. Many pilots land in between ESS and the goal line. Tricky task until the very last meter indeed!

From the hotel to the meeting point

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Today I got the start right. On time. At the right place. With the right guys. During the first transition, and the first transition only, I experienced again this cool feeling of leading the pack. Anyway, the race is won after the last glide, not at the end of the first one. We had an interesting task to complete, turning clockwise around the Ibituruna Peak, let’s go.

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So we had the first task of the 2013 SuperFinal. An overcast sky was not looking too good until noon, a front is announced from the South for the next days, nevertheless the Meet Director sent us on a not-so-easy out-and-return trip to Engenheiro Caldas. Honorin is the winner of the day, taking the right amount of risks to validate as low as possible the (cylindric) End of Speed Section, say 100m AGL, find a thermal savior in order to gain 1000m and glide to goal 8km away.

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6:36am. Skype bell is yelling on my cellphone. Then on my tablet. What the hell, I was sleeping so well! Who’s that? Well, now I am smiling, my 21 month old son just understood the purpose of the green button next to my face on his mother’s iPad… An opportunity to spend the 24 missing minutes making faces in front of my screen. Life can be good sometimes.

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After about an hour waiting for the official 20R$ shuttle for the unofficial training day, four of the right on time pilots – me included – jumped in the first 4WD offering a 20 minutes ride to the take-off instead of the usual 1h+ for two mere additional Euros. That gave me ample time to stick my number on the wing, eat and drink and chat again at the Bar da Rampa. Plus some surf thanks to the very convenient W-LAN connection, plus some simulation with the latest beta version of the Compass firmware, which I am sure is not the last.

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