PG OPEN ROUND 1 - MANILLA - DAY 2

Curious spectators

It's getting a bit silly, now, isn't it guys?

More Kiwi pilots making the 100km+ club, including Robbo, Roy Tingay, Glen Stevens, Stuart Macintosh, Keith Clapson, Louis Tapper, Elliot Revell-Nash and Leighton Joll.

Oh and I forgot to mention that Rodger Kerr was another to fly over 100km the previous day. Awesome stuff, guys. And with 45 pilots in goal, it was another successful task.

The day brought us stronger winds from the SSE, and the thermals were a bit scrappy. The task was set in the same direction as Task 1, with an 8km start cylinder around Mt Borah, a waypoint at Upper Horton to keep us on track, then on to End of Speed at Terry Hei Hei (2km) with goal a 1km cylinder around the same. Australia's Peter Slade was the task winner, making goal in 2h24m.

The feedback from Monday's task was that the 20km goal cylinder made for tricky retrieves, so this tidied that up a bit and meant that pilots were more likely to land close together.

It's been interesting to see how many pilots make quick trips to the bomb-out, through scruffy climbs and big sink, then head straight to goal on a re-flight.

Of course nothing is perfect, and the challenge on Tuesday was a Telstra outage in the area (most pilots are using Telstra SIMs), as well as some widespread failures with SPOT trackers for several hours. This made for some further long retrieves and confusion as to where the pilots and their drivers would be.

The task committee has been using an interesting method of starting the task - instead of one start time or gates, we've had a start window of between 30 and 45 minutes, with pilot's speed results being elapsed time from leaving the start cylinder. It seems to be quite an effective way to avoid having 120 competitors hanging around just over launch waiting for the gun.

Scores: Highcloud Kiwi Open Results