"Campeonato de España de parapente 2008" (Mr.Bean se va a volar !!)

Saturday was our last chance to get a task but when we woke up it was murky and cloudy with cloudbase about 200m below the launch. Theres nothing like a bunch of pilots for optimism in the face of 'weather adversity'! I am sure the collective will for a task cleared the clouds away.. Ok it was still blowing over the back all morning but at least we could see the valley. After much deliberation a 77km task to El Burgo de Osma was set - finally we were flying downwind :-) -well, as soon as the wind came up the face of the launch we would be!
I left at the first start time with a good gaggle who after about 8km turned back to get a later time! All alone for the next hour because I didn't want to risk the glide into wind (they were all on competition wings and moving back very slowly) I then struggled with broken ratty climbs for the first 25km. After a slow but finally rewarding climb at Riaza to 2600m I was back in the game after nearly landing. The next 50km were easy in the flats gliding from one blue thermal until I bumped into another with ground speed of 70km/h+. Climbs were up to 8m/s and smooth (apart from the one where the Nova proto glider spat itself into a vicious auto-rotation exiting the thermal just a few hundred meters in front of me). A slow 2 :44 hours to get there but finally I was in goal. :-)

All week the scores had been up on the notice board and then down again as often as a whores drawers. The prizegiving finally happened at 03:30 on Sunday morning when they managed to get the top 3 results correct after a nightmare time with missing tracks and wrong times. Lots of Red Bull was needed to keep us awake! Ramon Morillas played guitar and generally kept us amused long after his set was due to end, never mind Miquelons tale of swimming across the Duero river with his glider on his back after his attempt to build a raft had failed!

Xevi Bonet won the competition overall and I won the chics ranking... I still have a long way to go to catch up with the boys but finally I am feeling really good in the air again. I am off to Bulgaria on Thursday for World Cup so that should put me in my place again pdq!!