My Chile Adventure

8th Sailplane Grand Prix World Final MY CHILE ADVENTURE

BY MARK TINGEY

February 2018

TO GO OR NOT TO GO? – THAT WAS THE QUESTION In the build up to the World Champs in Benalla, I had taken three months off work and flown close to 150 hours. While competing in the Queensland State Champs, the Australian Nationals, the Australian GrandPrix and then the Worlds themselves I had driven more miles and seen more of the Australian back country than I cared to remember. The daily routine and flying in the Worlds was intense. After arriving home, I didn’t want to see my glider again for some time. I just needed a complete break.

I

had

largely forgotten about the success I had had, coming second at the Australian Grand Prix in Horsham. But that had been the highlight of my gliding career so far. I was leading going into the last day only to be overtaken by Geoff Brown on a short fast task where the opportunities to catch up were limited. In any event, I was more than happy with second place, particularly against a quality field of local pilots including, a few of the Australian team who were there to practice for the Worlds. To be fair, I surprised most there, including myself. But I enjoyed

the Grand Prix format where you don’t need to be the best pilot around the race track. It was more about playing the man and just making sure you beat the guy next to you. I had done a fair bit of match racing in yachting and understood the concept of covering. By playing the gaggle game and not letting the ego get ahead of myself, I could see what was going on in front of me and then position myself to take advantage of what was the better air and the decisions of the pilots in front. The pilots who became isolated, got left behind by the gaggle. You didn’t need to come first, you just needed to accumulate points each day which all added up over the course of the competition. Like the traditional format, consistency still pays dividends. So, to walk away with second place and four podium day finishes, I was pretty pleased with my effort.

But I had pretty much made my mind up that I couldn’t justify the time and cost of going to Chile for what amounts to eight days of flying against the world’s best, in some of the most dramatic mountains on the planet.

IT’S A ONCE IN A LIFETIME EXPERIENCE…

It wasn’t until about August, after several people had said to me – “Mate – you just need to go, it’s a once in a lifetime experience”, that I began to rethink things. But the round trip

22 February–April 2018

“mate – you just need to go, it’s a once in a lifetime experience”,

I began to rethink things.

Mark and Ange

Photo Sebastian Kawa

Pilots dinner and opening ceremony

to Chile with my own glider (as there weren’t any competitive gliders to rent) was going to cost about $45k to $50k – how could I afford or justify that? A discussion with my partner Angela got us thinking outside the square. I sent an email to the Vitacura gliding club to explore the opportunities of a house swap. Within three days, I had three people lining up, saying they would love to come to NZ. A long and funny story cut short, but we ended up doing a house swap with a lovely Chilean family. That deal provided us with a four bedroom home with swimming pool, one minute’s drive from the gliding club, two cars and a full time maid who did all our washing, kept the house and cooked us breakfast and dinner each night if we needed it. Ok – accommodation sorted and $10k saved.

Next, the hard bit – how to get my glider there? All of the European pilots had their shipping paid for as that was just part of the deal to hold the SGP final in Vitacura. There was no money left in the kitty for anyone else, particularly for a lowly ranked Kiwi. You had to pay for your own way there or don’t go. Simple as that. As it happened, I fortuitously bumped into Graeme Marshall from the Port of Tauranga at a social function one night and got talking about the Chile opportunity. He, like many others, thought I should give it a go and thought my story from zero a couple of years ago

to hero and being invited to the world final in Chile was worth supporting. One thing led to another and with the support of the Port senior management team (who I know well from my work as a commercial lawyer), I was introduced to Gerrard Morrison, the Managing Director of Maersk Shipping Line. Thankfully, he liked my story as well and before I knew it, Maersk had offered to ship me to Chile and back in a 40 feet container for nothing – I couldn’t believe my good fortune. The whole Chile adventure was now becoming real and Angela and I were committed to giving it a crack. With the support of my partners at Holland Beckett Law, and some funding to cover the entry fee and tows from the NZ Umbrella Trust, I was on my way into the unknown and the intimidating mountains of the Andes. To be fair, I didn’t really have a full understanding of what I was getting myself into at this point.

BUT HAVE I BITTEN OFF MORE THAN I CAN CHEW??

By now it was early September and it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t flown since the Worlds. The logistics of getting Ange and I plus the glider to Chile took a bit of effort. My glider is a JS1C-Evo and to make matters worse, I was still trying to sort out issues with my jet having sent it to Germany and back

February–April 2018

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MY CHILE ADVENTURE

Photo SK

Photo Sebastian Kawa

Closing Ceremony with Sebastian Kawa and Łukasz Wójcik

Literally flying the flag

for certification. I had three days flying at the Taupo comp in early November to at least have some time in the saddle before the glider had to be put in the container on November 23. With Bob Dirks from M&D in Australia flying over at the last minute to rebuild the jet the weekend before I left and with Ross Gaddes from Sailplane Services doing his thing to keep it all together, things were going down to the wire. I must say thanks to Brett Hunter, Ross, Bob, Uys Jonker and the JS team for sorting these issues out, under warranty, without a fuss.

Fast forward to 31 December. After, a couple of days in Buenos Aires sight-seeing and getting acclimatised, we arrive at Vitacura on New Year’s Eve to meet our Chilean ‘house swap family’, to get whirl wind instructions of how the house worked and then waving them goodbye an hour later on their way to NZ. Ange and I had a couple of wines, waited until 12 to see the New Year in and then lights out.

Standing on the taxiway at Vitacura airport, looking up at the Andes in the distance through the haze, it struck me. Here I was with only 600 hours to my name and only about 30 of those in the Omarama mountains, in a Spanish speaking country, having only flown three times in the past eleven months, looking at these massive brown mountains in 30 degrees of heat, not knowing anyone, wondering what the hell I was doing here.

Thank goodness Ange was with me – I couldn’t have managed on my own. There was only one thing for it – one step at a time. My primary aim at this point was to get home alive and with the glider in one piece.

NO REST FOR THE WICKED…

It took that day to get the glider out of the container, to rig it, to get all the compliance paperwork out of the way and to meet and greet all the local Chilean folk at the club. I must say, all the locals were extremely hospitable and helpful. We immediately felt welcome and nothing was really an issue. Most spoke pretty good English and we got by with hand gestures and google translate for the rest. I had a good briefing on the local circuit and flying conditions from Air Marshall Phil (Google) Sturley (pretty high up in the RAF I’d have to say) who was flying locally in his ASH 26M and who I got to know quite well – good bloke.

No rest for the wicked – the next day was straight into it. I had entered the Chilean Nationals as practice and today was the first task. Carlos Rocca and Rene Vidal, the two local hotshots, were a fantastic support. Carlos’ motto was – ‘we would rather make friends than win trophies’. They both imparted their knowledge freely of the local area, the hotspots, what heights you need to be to go from ridge A to ridge B and more importantly, about where

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MY CHILE ADVENTURE

Photo Sebastian Kawa

Photo Sebastian Kawa

Photo Sebastian Kawa

Photo Sebastian Kawa

not to go. The locals pretty much had every house thermal in the first 200 kms, both north and south, dialled into their memories. Local knowledge here is everything.

The only comforting thing was knowing that every mountain valley, where water was flowing to the Chilean coast, had an exit – where you could escape to the relative safety of the Santiago valley. There are no blind valley traps that you really needed to worry about.

The next eight days or so were getting used to the local conditions. Just getting off tow and onto the home ridge/thermal of Manquehue, the small hill just behind the Vitacura airport, could be exciting. This is the equivalent of Omarama’s Mount Horrible. If the tow plane waved you off too far away or 50 m below the ridge, you could spend the next 20 minutes just getting back on top. You had to fly along the short ridge, sometimes very low, and then haul it into a steep left hand turn as soon as you felt the resident thermal (which starts at about 1.30 every day) kick you in the pants. Then, getting to the required start altitude was a task all in itself, which required a series of steps into rising ground, working (or on the weak days – grovelling at low level) your way up the La Dehesa valley using thermal or ridge or whatever worked until ultimately reaching the top of the adjacent Espanoles ridge at about 9000 feet – only then could you relax a bit and wait for the start gate to open.

Towards the end of the comp, I was starting to feel much more comfortable flying in the local mountains, being more current and at home in the cockpit and my best results were two 14th places out of 26 competitors. I didn’t realise it at the time but we had some of our best flying weather during this comp. As we got closer to the SGP, the weather got more stable and humid with the visibility reducing to where you couldn’t even see the mountains in the distance through the haze at times. I didn’t fly every day in an attempt to keep fresh and to give Ange a break from the 30 degree heat, and before the SGP started, we took a couple of days off and drove out to the coast at Zapallar, one of the most exclusive beach towns on the Chilean coast where the richest Chilean families seem to have their weekend beach houses to which they fly by private helicopter from Vitacura. Not a patch on some of our local beaches however.

NO TURNING BACK NOW…

In a flash, the SGP was upon us. It was good to meet all the international pilots and the hangers on. The opening ceremony was fun. Everyone was very friendly. The language differences made it easier to socialise with some but you could sit next to anyone and chat away quite happily. The event was well run and the results were well publicised so there is no point giving

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MY CHILE ADVENTURE

Approaching the Olivares Valley from north to south

a blow by blow account of each day. The results and interviews are on the SGP website for viewing – http://www.sgp.aero/ finals2017.aspx?contestID=28606.

I think it better simply to summarise the key take-aways from

the event as I saw them.

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The difficulty of the conditions need to be put in perspective: Łukasz Wójcik, who is ranked 12th in the world, described the comp as the hardest he has ever done. We had one fatality. And one near fatality – we called the lucky pilot the ‘one-metre man’. Had his cockpit struck terra firma one metre in either direction – he would have been a different statistic. One near miss with a glider pulling up in front of another and only missing by metres – the second pilot reckoned that if he had been fully ballasted, he would not have recovered from the resulting stall when taking avoiding action. Prior to the comp, another Duo Discus was written off landing out – the pilots were lucky to walk away. One pilot, on two separate occasions, had to fly under high tension power cables to escape – there were power lines all over the place. I nearly had to crash land on a shallow plateau while trying to escape after falling off a ridge – I must have only been metres off the ground for some distance. And these were only the events I got to hear about. It wasn’t for the faint hearted. I was genuinely happy to be home alive and in one piece. But each pilot had to assess the risks he was willing to take and how far he was willing to push it.

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Unfortunately, the weather was pretty average on the whole. Two days were cancelled and half of the remaining comp was flown in average to below par conditions. On the first day, I

had no vario with water in my static and flew the whole task using good old fashion seat of the pants feeling and visual references. On the good days, the flying was exhilarating. On the poor days, it could be a grovel and downright frightening continually scratching away at very low levels, sometimes with five or six other gliders all fighting for survival. Some of the turbulence was the worst I have experienced, with all of my side pockets emptied and the contents sometimes floating around the cockpit in front of my eyes. Having flown in the Andes in these conditions, I don’t think there is much that could phase me now back in NZ.

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My best result was 11th – only 8 kph behind Sebastian Kawa and only 1 kph away from that elusive one point. I had some fairly famous names sitting below mine at least once. I thought there may have been a bit of magic still to come – but that was not to be. Some poor decisions and some circumstances that were forced upon me in the weak weather scuppered any change of that elusive point. Report card reads – “was competitive in parts, but could do better.”

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But I have learnt a heap – flying at this level, you can’t not absorb the quality of the flying going on around you. One of the most exhilarating legs of a task was following Sebastian Kawa up the Animeta Valley – cruise climbing at 180 kph, polishing the rocks, pulling up and over the spines – when I got to the top, I said to myself – “Ahhh, so that’s how it’s done.” And when I was chatting with him over a beer afterwards, he said to me – “Ohhh, that was a bit dangerous, I didn’t know where I was going!!” But I was impressed with how smooth he flew in close proximity to the contours of the

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MY CHILE ADVENTURE

Dinner party at Mark's place. Carlos Rocca, Mark, Sebastian Kawa, Rene Vidal, Phil Sturley and Jon Gatfield.

Photo Sebastian Kawa

Photo Sebastian Kawa

5th largest copper mine in the world

ridge, using all the energy that was available to him.

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One of the highlights for me was getting up and over the pass of the Olivares Valley. The pass is close to 16,000 feet and you fly very close to sheer rock faces, glaciers and some of the most spectacular scenery imaginable. North to south is reasonably straight forward if the conditions are good. However, we got tasked one day going from south to north – only about 50 people in the world had ever done that route previously. Unfortunately, it was a difficult day – I didn’t make it despite several attempts. Being at 14,000 feet but only a couple of hundred metres off the valley floor was not very comfortable – time to cut the losses and escape while I still could.

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As with most things however, not many remember the results, but the relationships you develop with the people you meet along the way endure. Most pilots stayed on for a beer on most nights. Many nights were shared in restaurants swapping war stories of comps gone by. Personal and enduring friendships were forged. Contacts for future gliding adventures to Europe and beyond were made. This experience was made better by the small group of pilots attending. You rely on each other to keep each other safe – an unspoken bond develops between you – like having gone into battle and survived.

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I really like the SGP format. It is just more fun. You start together, finish together and get to the bar together. Short fast racing tasks in the strongest part of the day with a late briefing. No silly start line games. Close flying with high energy finishes make for exciting racing. If we want to

encourage young people into competition flying, then this would be a good way to do it. I would encourage the sailplane racing committee to consider the North Island Regionals to adopt this format. I’m getting Brian Spreckley (Contest Director of the SGP) to send me the formula to hold a SGP with handicapped gliders – this can be easily done using various turn point circle sizes depending on the handicap of the glider. SGP versus the traditional format is a bit like the difference between One Day Cricket verses a five day test match on a dead pitch. The one day format is just more fun and fun is where it’s at to retain interest in the sport.

WOULD I DO IT AGAIN?

So when it’s all said and done – would I do it again? The competitor in me says yes, as I always strive to do better and I know there is better in me. But not anytime in the foreseeable future – the cost and energy required is right up there. What appeals to me now is putting on the 21 m tips and picking the eyes out of the good weather for a change and seeing how far and in which direction the strong conditions will take me.

I need to again thank my sponsors: Maersk Shipping Line, Holland Beckett Law, Port of Tauranga and the NZ Umbrella Trust for the support and funding they have given me. Without it, this adventure simply would not have been possible. Thank you.

Lastly, I need to thank Angela who would have to be the No. 1 crew in the world. The support during the competition and her sufferance hanging around gliding clubs in the heat is very much appreciated. We both had a great time but some boating and more leisurely pursuits are on the cards for now.

February–April 2018

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