First day of competition

When we got up on Sunday morning the same weather faced us. Regardless we headed down to the launch site for the 5.30am briefing. When we walked in, there were 2 markers on the tables and a task sheet with 2 HWZ tasks. During the briefing, the competition director, David Levin, decided to put the briefing on hold for 45 minutes while they watched the weather to see if the rain would ease. However when we returned at 6.45, they decided to cancel the flight. After a nice relaxing breakfast at our favorite café, when chilled out at the briefing tent and waited for the official All Teams photo on the field and the welcoming lunch.



The all team photo is always a lot of fun, trying to get all of the balloonists onto a single podium. There is always a lot of heckling and shenanigans.

The welcome lunch in the main tent involved a lot of speeches and a presentation of a flag, created by the local school children, to each pilot. After all 102 pilots had got up to receive their flag, they announced the buffet was open. As the 400 or so balloonists charged the buffet, we decided to go home and grab some lunch and have a snooze.
When we arrived back at the field for the 4.00pm briefing, we found a note saying the briefing would be delayed until 4.30pm. When we entered the tent we found that there was just a single HWZ task. The Met guy was convinced that the rain was going to clear by 6pm. I have never seen a Met person be as certain about something as he was. So David Levin told us to go and park on our launch sites and return at 5.30pm for a supplementary briefing. While other teams took out their baskets and started rigging their burners, we opted to keep the gear in the van knowing we could be set up and inflated in 10 minutes if we needed to. As we entered the tent at 5.30pm the rain had started to get quite heavy. The Met guy was still convinced that the rain was going to stop at 6pm on the dot, so the plan was for the yellow flag to go up around 5.55pm and the green flag to go up at 6pm. So we stood on the field in the rain and waited. As we waited for the flag a couple of fiesta balloons flew over the horizon and we could see that there was absolutely no speed and more importantly the direction was no good. David had set 5 goals for the HWZ in different directions, which was very wise with these unpredictable conditions, however there was none in the direction that the winds (below the clouds were going). So it was starting to look pretty obvious that the task would be canned. The last thing they would want is 102 balloons disappearing into the cloud trying to find the required left turn.

So sure enough, at 6pm the yellow flag went up and 5 minutes later it was followed by the black flag… time to go to the pub. We headed up to the Hofkirchen Balloon Hotel, to find some drinking company, where Joe Hertsill from the US team invited us to come and be honorary Americans and join the entire US team for their traditional team dinner. It is always good to hang out with the US team as they are great fun and also very interesting to chat to. As most people in ballooning know about 25% of ballooning experience and learning happens when sitting around chatting to balloonists. So sitting next to people like Joe, Pat Canon (another experienced US pilot) and David Levin at dinner was great.

A few Puntigamers (the local beer) and a schnitzel later and it was time to retreat back to the house.