By some miracle the day dawns clear and it’s looking like we are going to fly. I was wondering how the hell we could go from driving rain to a clear dawn and then I remember. It was Will Gadd’s 40th birthday last night and we sacrificed him and his liver to the weather gods. It was ugly but effective, and Gadd’s moans at the clear morning could heard thoughout the trailer park. I only wished his birthday was earlier in the meet. We headed up the hill for a noon briefing and noticed cloudbase barely over the top of the hill, the horror, the horror. There was a lot of speculation as to what kind of task was doable in these conditions, they called yet another 60k downwind task to yet another goal I would never see. Best to get on with it. If the gaggles were bad before, nothing prepared me for today. It was magnitude 9.5 clusterfuck on a scale from 1-11 (yes, 11). Fortunately, there were no collisions but not for a lack of trying. No one was able to get to base and stay there, so we all churned in the same 1000 vertical feet and the same 1k radius as the starts clicked by. Finally, people just started on course at ridge height and gave up on getting any higher. I decided the most effective way to avoid the chaos was to sinkout and have to drive back up for another go (I had to piss anyway). Sure enough it works. Things cleared out and I relaunch 10 minutes after the last start of 2:00. It’s still a struggle and I finally get to cloudbase and on course. Thank god. Its all going well and I’m staying at base, flying by myself, and generally enjoying the flight. I get to a blue hole about 25k out on course and head in hoping to get lucky. No luck for me this meet and I have a good landing by the main road. A ride appears instantly and I’m back to Manila in no time. Nice people here, really nice. The big news is Tom and Josh made goal. Tom started the day in 5th, Christian Maurer was in 3rd place and went down early, as did Tomas Brauner in 4th place. The number one and two (Goldsmith and Caron) were much slower than Tom today. We are sure he will be on the podium but where? We had over 60 in goal today so the point spread could be just big enough. Tom may take the title. We will know tonight.

Bill