Day four Manilla XC

Date: 18th February 2007

I woke up and hit my head on a window sticking out of the trailer, then spilled some coffee and then forgot some stuff. In the air this pattern continued–I can normally keep my wing open, but I think the head-rattler made me more stupid than usual, the first half of the flight was an exercise in patience and self-tolerance… The second half was sort of the same but with slower thermals. In the end I went about 173 despite having one of the more “stupid” days I’ve ever had in the air. My goal became simply to stay in the air until 6:30, everytime I tried to make a move I ended up low and grovelling…

The evening drive back was the best part of the day, Oz sure is a stunning country. Saw lots of Kangaroos (yep, they really do exist in the wild, not just on the tourist T-shirts…) and other animals. It’s an odd landscape here, everything is just slightly different. It reminds me most of east Texas in terms of terrain, lots of trees but stil very arid. It’s wetter around Manilla than to the west, every day the climbs have really improved once we get through a relatively wet area about 50 K to the west of launch.

Up the hill to do it again now. I’ve flown almost 20 hours in my last three flights, starting to feel that, but in the World’s we could fly six days straight so I want to train up for that.

WG

PS–had a good dry tooling session on a local swing set the other evening, I may have the only ice tools in Manilla. Elbow holding up, not going hard on it but finding little bits of time to train here and there. Looking forward to a rest day…

Posted in: Blog

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Comments

midtoad   February 19, 2007 4:02 pm

hey Will, thx for posting all the stories and congrats on the 220k!

Ewa’s story has indeed gone global (my mom in Ottawa called me about it), and we all want to see the tracklog.

I got to do some dry-tooling in a Calgary climber’s garage gym last week: leash-less tools are great!

cheers
midtoad