13th Nepal Open 2012 here we go!

Firstly apologies for those of you that tried to see the live tracking and were disappointed, It seems that the Nepal cell network is proving to be more of a hassle than normal. There are several pilots here with the live and we are all trying to get them operational for the Russian Open in a week.

The points for this years comp look much more attractive then last years, today was the official opening ceremony and training day. The opening was held at Paranova Landing and was running on Nepali time . I had no problems with this as it was a nice occasion to get together with friends as even though we see each other in the air nearly every day we seldom get a chance to chat. At around 1100am we all headed in the direction of the T.O.

Getting to T.O. earlier than most I took the opportunity to get out ahead of the chaos still making its way up the hill. Being a training day and no points being awarded I headed off towards the first waypoint. getting cloud base there I started my way across the valley to Greenwall, it was nice to turn around and see that 6 other gliders were following my lead. I quickly turned around to take some on coming shots of them before over taking them before we skipped over Dicky Danda straight onto the wall.

getting to Dicky Danda some of the pilots hesitated to go over to greenwall with the height that we had, I went ahead on my own and was soon rewarded with a nice 4m/s thermal to the top of the ridge. the rest were slowly making their way along greenwall now and managed to hook some nice lift at the hill side village.

I was satisfied today with a quick flight to Greenwall and getting some snap shots of the pilots that came over.

 

on the flight back we heard over the radio that the start gate is open, initial plan was to catch the leaders and fly with them but by the time we got height to get over to Greenwall we could see rain clouds forming just north of the route and we ended up turning back to Sarangkot.