Jacobina Open

I was impressed(and scared)with the take off in Jacobina. Very windy, turbulent and low, just 240 meters.

getting there

In a unstable day like the first day of the Jacobina Open, one mistake and the landing field would be your destiny, very quick! But (almost thankfully) just 4 pilots where able to take off that day ( and I wasn't one of them), because the wind had shifted , and just 3 of them went to the free distance task. The longest flight was 104km, flown by Felipe, a young guy from Governador Valadares and 101km flown by Cesar Castro, a very well known pilot from Rio Grande do Sul, the other extreme of the country. The other flight was 74km made by Anselmo a local pilot from Bahia.

Some paragliders where trying to take off early in the morning of saturday, when we arrived at the take off

The second day was even more unstable, with a lot of cirrus type formations but at least the conditions for take off where better. Was a real lottery day and all of the pilots who took off before me landed right there at the base of the mountain, after strugling with broken thermals for a little while. I was lucky and got something weak and finally could gain altitude enough to cross the mountain range, one of the most beautiful sites I've ever seen from the air. I wish I had some pics...

Me bringing back prizes for a 15k flight!

Some pilots took off again, but just one could get passed the mountain range like me. The conditions where weak and a inversion layer at 1.000 meters was very difficult to trespass. So I wasn't able to cross the second obstacle, a mesa kind of mountain with not too many options for landing, so I decided to came back and landed at the city airport, just 15km away, but enough to win the task.