Day 2 - great Flying and a Long Wait

Today we got another special briefing, Brendan is here and we both wanted to undertake a task. at briefing we enquired about a good task and ended up with a 320km task into the mountains. "How good is this" I was thinking after getting a nice start with Brendan and heading north on the first leg. a couple of nice climbs, cruise along a ridgeline (nice scenery, lots of bubbles) and then a long glide into a valley with limited options particularly with airspace blocking the exit to the west. We both climbed away slowly from quite a low save and then tiptoed towards the north again, only to be forced around by limited options. Man there's some impressive terrain in this area, big rocky outcrops that didn't quite get into the detail in Condor! I managed to get 2 knots from against a ridge but Brendan was unable to reach my point and was forced into a paddock. On my own now I climbed to base and set off crossing easterly into the better valley (should have worked that out earlier ;-). I managed to make the first turn at the edge of a large lake and set off on the next leg toward the higher mountains and only the odd raggy cu with a rather large blue hole. After a struggle to get a decent climb and some time trying to get any climb I was resigned to a grassy paddock on steep slope, about 1000ft above the narrow valley floor - now that was different for an Aussie flatlander. What followed was a long wait, very pleasant, as Charlie was already on the road to pick up Brendan. Eventually I negotiated a local retrieve crew, more waiting and at about 7:30pm I walked down to the main road (3km). More waiting at the bus stop until about 9:15pm when Eduard and Thomas arrived. We then managed to drive up to the glider not without us getting out and pushing at one stage. Quick de-rig in the dark and 2 hours of driving later we got back at about 12:15am. What a day!