Day 3

Leigh: ridiculously good AND an all round nice guy: Bastard.

What a difference a day makes. After yesterday's disaster, today was fabulous fun. Leigh rocketed around 460kms at 143kph in a 3 hour AAT and won the day by a big margin: superb. I didn't fly today, but I did sit in my glider as it was towed around by Leigh. To be fair, I did manage to repay some of his earlier kindness with a bit of moral support on the ridges later in the flight.

We had a great run South setting off with Jay Rebbeck and John Coutts and our second climb behind Vellino saw the average at 13.4kts and looking back at the trace the instant vario peaked at 19.7kts. Not a bad climb! Further down track we were delighted to bump into Riccy Brigliadori and assumed he'd show us the way for the rest of the flight. We turned deep in the first sector and ran back the way we'd come to avoid the rain to our East. Back up at 11,000' over Vellino we lost sight of Riccy and set off for the Assergi bowl, looking enviously at a motorway of clouds on our East. We assumed that was where Riccy had gone, and looking back at his trace that was indeed the case, but  it didn't work out for him and we overtook him here. The last bit of the flight was on the ridges for 150kms in the 10-12kt SW breeze. Riccy got down to 400' above ground and stuck near Foligno but we were a little higher and able to push on into the valley of fun, following Jay Rebbeck.



It's always good to be in a start gaggle at 11,000'

I have been warned not follow Jay on marginal final glides and this was the buttock clenching example of why not. That's unfair - we went through pretty low and it was barely working but it got us home fine.

Afandi won the 18's (brilliant), Coutts got a hat-trick with another win in the standards (outstanding) so all in all a great day for the team!