On Sunday (2024-07-14) I took part in the Wanderbird Trophy of Dorf Tirol 2024.
At WANDERBIRD Events you play the game of hike & fly together with like-minded people who want to have a good time and race. WANDERBIRD Events are designed around our highest values: Inclusiveness, Courage (for development), Appreciation, Fun and Safety.
This participation was my second time to take part. Last year in September I took part in the Hike and Fly Trophy of Stubai in September with a lot more walking and a lot less flying due to my not yet developed flying skills. Since then I flew more then 50 hours (which is more then half of my total flight hours in my two years of flying), learned a whole bunch about thermals, gained the will and courage to stay in the weakest of them, and learned how to glide above valleys between thermals.
In my 2023 race in Stubai I was the first participant who didn't make it into goal. By 3 minutes! I was devastated.
That Sunday, though, I finished with loads of time to spare and so much hight above goal I could have run an acro show (if I actually knew how to do acro 😅—next year; maybe). It felt great!
On the way up to the first launch I felt great and had pretty good speed. I arrived at the turn point pretty early in the group but far away from being first (still loads of training to do on that side). Instead of launching there (only like 2 people did) I turned to the next leg of the first hike. I needed to give the weather more time to develop and I wanted to use that time gain some more height. After 1200m of elevation gain in 1:45 I had reached my launch pad. There though I sat and waited. I watched other pilots with better gliders gain height and start their first crossings, saw yet others not gain any height and directly started crossing the valley with 100% certainty to have a hike there, and I sat there with others who waited for more stable thermals too. I waited for about an hour at launch to get better conditions. And comparing my results to people who launched that hour earlier; this wasn't a bad call.
On my first launch I did start to lose a lot of initial height and feared that I couldn't regain it. But eventually I did find consistent lift and could gain height over launch and then over the mountain top up there. I was able to reach cloud base on my next climb a mountain over and then set out to glide over the valley towards my next turn point. This is where I started to get annoyed because I lost so much height that I practically knew that I need to go on another hike. Once I came over and found just enough lift to stay up but not get higher I had to land to assist another glider who went down and on landing hurt their ankle (The pilot is doing pretty good so far and has their spirits up for the next event in Stubai!).
This landing meant the start of another two hour hike to gain 800m of elevation to the next turn point. I was devastated. I had to convince myself to not give up because of this and just push through. About half way up the hike I was joined by another pilot on the race and thus we set out on a hike together. We ended up at the turn point 5 hours and 15 minutes into the race and then went to launch 6 hours in.
From there I really had one of my best flights yet. I immediately found lift, could stay in it till cloud base, stayed near it and even gained height on glides (so much so that I even had to spiral out of a cloud on one occasion), and reached the air-taggable turn point with so much height above ground that I knew I can find many places to gain more height on my way back. No stress, no long sink alarms, just pure joyful gliding! On that glide I got a text from my brother saying: "I'm not even down at the bus station and you are back at the 2nd turn point?!" I replied with a short video on Signal: yeah its going great!
And after that I recorded this video with my emotional response to how good its going because I knew at that point I no longer needed to hike or run or do anything other than just enjoy the flight.