Late evening shot of runway 32 at Lake Keepit with some rain on the horizon.

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Today’s weapon of choice, Discus 2b, and a lazy 190km flight under beautiful active clouds.

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I’m not exaggerating when I say I saw thousands of kangaroos on that drive. It was like driving through a slaughterhouse in some places where dead kangaroos littered the road every tens of meters. I slowed down to walking speed at some stages, and even then I could not avoid hitting roo’s that jumped out in front of the car. I hit 5 or 6 kangaroos, most at walking speed or less, so they did no damage and the kangaroo just jumped off again. But a big roo jumped out from behind a tree and landed in the grill of the car, damaging the grille and bonnet. I hope I never have to drive those roads again at night, it was insane. The locals said it was especially bad this year due to the dry conditions, as the only place the kangaroos find a little green grass is along the road and they flock there every night. It’s been extremely little rain in the area the last years, the Lake Keepit dam is down to under 1% of it’s capacity, it looks like the surface of the moon in places.

Having arrived late night/early morning at Keepit I got a few hours sleep and then prepared paperwork, and took the check-flight and so on to be able to fly the LS7 glider I had booked at Keepit.

The first few days we had some windy conditions, with gustfronts and duststorms every afternoon. Here’s a timelapse of one front arriving at the airfield.

I flew 5 days out of 7, and we had some OK conditions, but none of the classic days with high cloudbase and nice streets into the horizon that I had hoped for. The first few days I had issues with the Oudie flight computer not working as it should and I did not want to venture too far out with no glide and navigation aids, but I still had some good flying.

For the weekend I joined the Keepit GP competition, it’s a fun low-level XC competition, perfect as a first comp in gliders for me. Saturday we got very weak conditions to start with, and I had to take 4 tows to get up and away on the task, I had problems staying up, and got away way to late for the task. At the first TP we met with showers and lightning from an approaching storm, I did not want to fly into that and turned back with a few other late gliders to get to the airstrip before the gustfront came through.

Sunday and Monday we got better conditions, still some OD around us, but I finished both tasks. Saturday was a very slow day, I got stuck and had to stay in weak lift for way to long on the 300km task. Monday was a little shorter 250km task, I was still slow, but much faster than the day before. It’s a learning curve similar to flying hanggliding competitions, you never realize how efficient it’s possible to fly until you start flying competitions, it’s a steep learning experience.

All in all it was a great week of flying gliders, meeting up with old friends again and making some new. I drove from Keepit under a perfect looking sky the 8 hours drive up to Brisbane on Tuesday, and I saw some great flights were logged on OLC that day, including Tomas Suchanek flying over 1000km OLC flight from Narromine.

Now I’m at Brisbane airport waiting for my flight back to Oslo, via Bangkok.

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The next day we headed through the rain for the 3 hours drive to Rainbow Beach, it was flyable when we arrived, and we got a nice afternoon of flying over the Carlo Sandblow. We set up some cameras on the gliders, and also took some good pictures from the ground.

The following day Kirsten and Marcin had joined us, and we hoped to fly the whole day. We carried gliders up again, it’s a 500m walk on a forest track, but we got stuck in rain the whole day and had to pack up when the sunset came.

The last day we carried up again, but the rain stopped the early flying, so we had lunch and went back up to fly when it cleared up a little. We got great conditions again, wish we got better light for photos, but some were great despite losing the good light.

Rainbow Beach is not really a traditional sand dune, but a sandblow in the ridge a hundred meters or so over the beach and sea. It’s however a great flying site with awesome toplanding and lowpass potential.

A selection of pictures and videos by Zhenya, Andrey, Kirsten and me.

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Totalt results are at the Forbes Flatlands website

My flights are on flightlog.org and XContest, I got around 13 hours and nearly 500km open distance from the competiton, making the top 7 in the world XContest for HG at the time of writing :-)

Now I am in Sydney after delivering Olav and Crystal at the airport for their flights home, while I will stay a bit longer in Australia. The plan is to go to Rainbow beach to fly the dunes, then I will head back down to Lake Keepit and fly Sailplanes for the last week.

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