Bright Open - Day 4

Today was the first flyable day of the Bright Open. It's been really well organised by Benn and Hamish but, until today, the weather hasn't co-operated.
But today we got to fly - and although the day didn't look very good initially (windy, with a really low cloud base and a short thermic period) it turned out much better than expected.
The task committee decided we start at Goldmine before flying to Smoko Ridge, Blackfella's, Freeburg Ridge, and landing at the Porepunkah Airfield.
Launch went well... ...with all the field off pretty soon - and everyone was going up nicely.
I timed my run over to the Goldmine badly and got there late, low, and behind most of the field. After a lot of looking around I eventually started getting high (around 1,600m was high today!) but heard on the radio that the task had been canceled. This was puzzling for me, as the weather seemed fine and I couldn't think why else the task would be canceled - but I could see from the way the other pilots were flying that they were heading down to landing spots so I spiraled down and landed at the Mystic LP. There I heard that one of the pilots had smacked in pretty hard near the Mystic launch while thermalling low and badly broken his wrist and possible hurt his back. An air ambulance had been called, and the organisers wanted paraglider pilots on the ground before the helicopter arrived.

After packing up and trying to find out some of the who, where, how, how bad questions (along with everyone else) we headed back to the Outdoor Inn for some food and to await developments.
Turns out we hadn't been flying for long enough for the task to score any points so as of the fourth day of the comp we are all still equal first....

Once the injured pilot had been flown out a number of us went back up the hill and had a very nice fly in the later afternoon conditions.

I had a really fun glide over to Clearspot with Paul and another pilot on an Aspen2
- formation flying by the end and although we were flying into a headwind it was a pretty boyant glide. After that I hunted around clearspot for a good climb but it wasn't working that well and the highest I got was 1,560m so I headed down towards Blackfellas, then along the ridge towards the airfield. There were little bubbles around, but nothing really worth turning in so I ended up landing at the airfield after Paul. A fun fly!