With another good forecast I headed back down to the south side of the main ridge for another attempt at a big FAI triangle, yet again it did not go to plan, however on this occasion I only have myself to blame.
Everything was a bit of a rush as my original plan was to head to Sillian, however when we got there we found that Saturday was the rest day for the lift, I did not think to check that a Gondola which I knew was operational was running on a Saturday! We hastily made our way to Greifenburg, where Becky drove me up to the Emberger Alm which saved some time. After a quick walk up to the start place I setup and quickly launched, it was clear that the conditions were good, but not as good as forecast with a much lower cloud base.
The first leg went well until I got to the valley crossing which had to be taken in order to make the route a 100km FAI triangle, for some reason, despite knowing that I was way too low to make this crossing easily, I decided to push on. This was a bad decision as I ended up in the lee of one valley wind, in another valley wind and below the inversion. This created horrible conditions, however after a lot of patience I managed to climb back up and was back in the game.
This is where I made my second poor decision, I hadn’t properly researched transport back to the start as my plan had not been to come here, and I was looking at an ever darkening sky and decided that I was too late to head north. So I thought I would just enjoy a shorter flight and head back to the start. This was a huge mistake as anyone who knows the area will tell you, as I flew straight into the Lee of two valley wind systems and was very rapidly flushed down to the valley where I landed in 34kph winds.
The day was really frustrating, as if I had not been so focussed on my planned 100km route, I could have headed north and had a really enjoyable 85km FAI triangle, rather than bombing out frustrated again! Oh well, every flight is more experience.
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