This was an interesting flight, short, but a lot to learn. The flight plan was to have fun sticking together as Team BGD (Setto, Emma and myself). There were times when I had a lot of altitude and could have made it to 49917 to attempt a valley crossing. My team mates were below me though so I tried to keep marking the thermal and waiting for them to gain altitude with me.
What ended up happening was Emma started to make the valley crossing at a time where I was slightly below at 5200 feet (ideally want 5500 before leaving the house thermals). It didn’t take long before Jason Setto, who was a bit below to bail and head back. I was getting low out, and not getting the lifty lines that Emma was, despite following her exact path at similar altitudes
I decided to turn back and see if I could get anything on the house thermal spines, but, starting to get lower, was making my way over to “last chance”.
I ended up climbing up from “the house”, getting a low save, but not finding it working very consistently despite searching for it as much as I could. I made it back up to about 4400 feet, then saw just on the other side of the valley in front of last chance, Christina who was a bit higher climbing with another like a rocket. I made the bad decision to leave my weak ass thermal to go join here, but found the entire little valley crossing to head over in front of last chance a pretty strong -3m/s sink, so it was game over by the time I got there and didn’t have a rocket of a climb :(
Lessons learned:
- Stick with height margins, even if those on my team decide to cross early
- Don’t leave crappy lift to go and find good lift if I’m in “survival mode” trying to work a low save.