Flying task 3 of the XCTurkey competition. Note the inversion.
Another very inverted day at the Karadag, resulting in good climb rates on the mountain, and nice cloudbase of app. 2,900m, but as soon as we left the mountain the lid was at 1,900 m and all that happened below was SLOW.
Very little wind so pilots flew all over the place, which meant it was hard to keep track of the others, but me and fellow XCMag rep. Olivier Lauguero flew East, then South as it became apparent that the wind lower down was N.
Olivier landed more or less at the foot of the mountain (I think), while I managed to cling on for another three or four thermals until I landed just East of Karaman town.
We spent a long time over the top of the mountain trying out different options before finally committing to the glide into the blue, so we may get a little more distance than just TO>landing, as it seems they are using XContest/maxpunkte scoring (TO, 3 waypoints, L), but it still won’t impress anyone.
I landed around 2 pm, with the skies only just beginning to look up, so all in all a pretty frustrating day.
One pilot seems to think that the Russian, Dmitri, has made it onto a line of hills some 30 km SW of launch, if this is true then he may have gone far.
The rumour has it that there won’t be any airspace restrictions from tomorrow, if that is indeed the case then we just need some South wind so we can move the more normal Northerly route.
This place has good birding for those of us into that sort of thing, with flocks of pelicans coming over now and again, and large resident populations of Long-legged buzzards on the mountain.
I only wish the buzzards would be better at helping us out in the flats, we could sure use a hand out there! One thermal today was marked by European bee-eaters, nice of them.
I think we move to Cappadocia on Sunday. Hope it isn’t a good flying day as I am pretty sure the pilots are more keen to fly than to do underground churches, even with the latter being very good.
Fabrice the scorer is great at keeping the website updated with results, but you need to take them with a grain of salt as some pilots are only downloading on the following day – anyway, keep checking if admiring 30km flights is your thing 😀
I’ll write more when I know more about how things have gone for the folks today – most pilots seem to be back already, but surely not all.
