Flight

With thunderstorms due in the late afternoon we were not set as big a task as the day before, it was a 101km goal. I was first to launch, the conditions were a little scratchy at first but ended up being the strongest climbs I've ever been in! One of the climbs was an 18up!!! I was hanging onto my basebar for dear life as I went up vertically and got spat out the other side as I was too scared to turn, the 18 down sink then made me and the glider face vertically down! It recovered very quickly though.
I put a lot lessons learnt over the last few days flying here into practice and flew much better. I also remembered some advice from John B "DONT FOLLOW OTHER GLIDERS, FLY YOUR OWN COURSE!" I had just hit turnpoint 1 and had lost about 500ft on glide and the lead gaggle of about 13 VRs all started gliding in a straight line to turnpoint 2 over a small ridge, but I decided to go slightly off course to a much bigger into wind, into sun rockface mountain and shot up to cloudbase before I had time to think. I then shot past the lead gaggle at cloudbase that were now down to 600ft off the ground wasting time trying to get up, I tagged turnpoint two, topped back up to base and glided straight for turnpoint 3 across the lake! For about 20 minutes I was leading the day... However the inevitable happened, every glide they took they caught me up and I was also showing them the best thermals ahead on track and they soon overtook me and within a few glides had left me to fend for myself once more. I flew over the tour-de-france stage that was near town for just today. Absolutely fantastic watching 15,000 cyclists tearing around the mountain roads! 
I made goal, I had to choose different routes as I new I couldn't makes some of the glides that these guys were doing but I really enjoyed the day and celebrated with the an Ice cold Goal Beer!