OPEN THERMAL #8 DIGGERS REST 12 APR 2015 and THERMAL LEAGUE UPDATE

We had a fantastic day of thermal competition.
At the same time, in a different part of the paddock, Marcus and Hugh took the opportunity to hone their F3K skills for the upcoming F3K world championships.

It was cool and overcast in the morning and conditions were pretty difficult for thermal flying, but perfect for competition.
As the day progressed, the sun came out and we had blue sky with patches of cloud. The conditions became a little easier. At times it was necessary to travel a very long way to find a decent thermal. The thermal/sink cycles were very big.

None of the pilots managed to make the 10 minutes every time, and sometimes that hurt their scores quite badly, at other times it didn't when all pilots failed to get 10 minutes.
There were some great struggles low down and a particularly memorable one was Graham Norman who, after launch, didn't get over about 50 metres and yet made the 10 minutes and won the heat. Persistence paid off.

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Unfortunately F3K-7 was cancelled due to some organisational difficulties. F3K-8 did not have these problems.

F3K league event number 8 saw 7 pilots enjoy an unusually warm, sunny day with light winds at Jon's field in Longwood. The conditions looked excellent and after the first round everyone had 1000 points and we thought this was going to be a turnaround day - not to be! Conditions soon turned difficult and the thermals were breaking up and reforming for most of the afternoon, meaning you were in it one minute and out of it the next, making for a large spread of scores

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Andrew, Jim and David (Gerry behind the camera) at the Diggers Rest field.

It was a great day to try out our rather rusty F3B skills. Fine weather and a good breeze.

As the day progressed
- the conditions improved (except for the sun moving to exactly the wrong place for a while)
- the model setups were gradually, sometimes radically, tweaked
- we became more accustomed to flying the course
and this led to a significant improvement in our performances and some respectable speed times.

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OPEN THERMAL #7 MILANG SA 7-8 MAR 2015

Every once in a while an event comes along that has everything. The organisation, the competitors, the location, the weather. This was one of those. It takes a lot of effort by a lot of people to put together an event as good as this. A big THANK YOU to all of you.

35 pilots in 9 teams arrived for two days of F3J (with winches) competition. 12 preliminary rounds were flown, eight on the Saturday and four on Sunday. The top eight pilots then flew three 15 minute fly-off rounds to decide the winner.

There was a good breeze practically all the time, but not too much, and thermals were sometimes extremely elusive and sometimes as powerful as you could wish for. The log of one pilot's flight showed a maximum altitude of 1016 metres. That's high! We had full cloud cover at times and full sun at others. With three minutes between flight groups everybody was kept busy and we did a lot of flying.

After the dust settled the top three pilots were extremely close with 4.03 points between first and second, and 1.22 points between second and third (the next pilot was 382 points behind).
Congratulations to

1. Mike O'Reilly 2992.82
2. Marcus Stent 2988.79
3. David Hobby 2987.57

Preliminary Rounds
f3j_overall_results_r1-r12_2015.pdf
flight_scores_preliminary_rounds.pdf

Fly-0ff Rounds
f3j_flyoff_results_r1-r3_2015.pdf
flight_scores_flyoff_rounds.pdf

RCGA Thermal League - Progress Results

Full table of results for RCGA Thermal League here - rcga_thermal_league.pdf

OPEN THERMAL #6 BALLARAT 22 FEB 2015 and THERMAL LEAGUE UPDATE

This event went ahead with reduced numbers partly due to
 - Gerry recovering from minor surgery during the week.
 - Jim recovering from stepping on a large nail the night before.

From what I hear the conditions were hot, a bit windy, humid and overall pretty challenging making for a good competition. Everybody had at least two scores under 900 points! That's prectically unheard of.

David (Hobby) brought the landing spots, Marcus brought his computer and Tom was CD for the day. Thanks everybody.

The Ballarat club stepped up to help with line retrieval (and of course provided a feast at lunchtime) and everybody pitched in to make it work with seven pilots divided into two flight groups.
That way there were eight rounds flown on the day. Outstanding effort.

After the dust settled we had

1 David Hobby 7539.8
2 Tom Dupuche 7423.3
3 David Pratley 7364.0

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Despite the not so great forecast we had a brilliant days rcga open thermal competition at Digger’s Rest.

Blue skies greeted us upon arrival, but soon turned overcast, I would say the wind ranged from light to medium, with the really windy forecast stuff not hitting us til we were packing up end of day. Before lunch the lift was fairly light and in the right spot, turnable. One thing that surprised me was how low the cloud was for this time of year with the hills in the distance looking foggy and I know David H managed to find cloud base on one of his morning flights.

We had 9 starters for the day, not bad for a rescheduled event, and it was great to welcome back Andrew Fenech after a break of I don’t know how many years, but from when  it was still 7 in 9 minutes.

Anyway after lunch it was blue skies again, and thermals a-plenty, and we managed to finish 7 rounds.

Congratulations go to:

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Hi everyone

Well, that was two very tough days of flying at Diggers Rest. Most of the pictures shown below were taken on the Saturday (by Louise - thanks!) when the weather was better but it was pretty windy most of that day, averaging about 6 m/s by the end of the day. On the Sunday it was even windier (and a whole lot wetter as well) with the average speed

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Five flyers made the trip to Longwood for the 4th event of the F3K league. The weather was nice but quite breezy, with about 6m/s southerly wind blowing slightly downhill. Landouts became a problem for some pilots. Jon flew his Vortex 2 extremely well and was looking good in these conditions. Marcus and Hugh flew Snipes all day, David and Bernie flew XXlites. In the end Marcus held off Jon (who finished fast) for top spot, but it was very close.

1. Marcus Stent
2. Jon Day
3. Hugh Blackburn
4. Dave Milward
5. Bernie Sizer

f3k4_2015-overall_results-f3k.pdf

f3k4_2015-flight_scores_f3k.pdf