After the first five days of the Manilla XC-Open being not much more than rain, yesterday we finally had a task to try and fly. There was cloud overdevelopment in the area and the potential for much more. Due to this, Godfrey called a race to goal task that was kept the pilots in the local area between Manilla and Mt. Borah. Typically the tasks in this comp will be open distance, but the special conditions yesterday called for an atypical task. The task was 67k or so; it was a triangle from launch to town to upper manilla to launch. The task was a 30k triangle that we were supposed to fly twice, and it was an elapsed time start.

After launching I climbed to cloudbase and started out on course with a dozen other pilots. Soon after we exited the start most of the plots stopped for a weak climb though, though I did not. I continued flying further down course under the big dark cloud, mashing the speedbar as the climb got stronger and stronger. This move was only executed by myself and 2 other pilots. We left everyone behind us and we were out front leading the day, flying just under the dark clouds at base all the way to town where we tagged the first turn point. Soon after this as we were heading back towards launch and the next turnpoint the task was stopped due to overdevelopment. It was a good call to stop the task as conditions were getting potentially dangerous with rain and the distance and BIG clouds overhead and all over the course. So in the end, even though I and two others were in the lead the task was not worth any points at all.

I would love to go further into the details of this flight, but I need to go eat breakfast (muesli, mango, peaches and milk) and rush off to the pilots meeting. Today looks better than all the days past, and the days ahead look better than this. We are in for some epic flying. If anyone reads this today I will probably be at cloudbase mashing the speedbar on the edge! Think about that! Yeahhhh!

I did not take any pictures yesterday as I was on the bar the entire flight. Meredith did get one pic of me after we had landed. In this shot you can see just some of the dark skies that we were flying under. Woop Woop.