Light conditions, mostly blue skies with high cloud greeted us for Sunday 9 feb's round of open thermal with winches at Digger's Rest Victoria. We had 6 pilots attend and enjoy the light conditions to start with, and it was basically a landing competition. Lunch time came and went, and all of a sudden the wind came up and made the conditions suddenly challenging. Infact it caught quite a few pilots out, under ballasted, and there were quite a few out landings, me included.

The wind was easterly, and about 400 metres downwind is the next paddock, and you don't want to land in that paddock because it has a ravine running through it, with scattered tall bushes and some big boulders. I caught a thermal, took it downwind, but even though I got high-ish, I wasn't going to get back. So I've landed downwind, and as I start the long walk down wind, I can't see my plane, so I've landed in the bad paddock, and I thought I was close to the fence, so I'm hoping I didn't hit the cattle fence and write off my plane. At this point I'll mention I've loaned Marcus one of my old perfections to fly in the comp. So as I'm walking towards the next paddock to retrieve my plane, what do I see, but my other plane descending into the ravine of the same downwind paddock. 

 Anyway long story short, I landed just short of the start of the drop off, between the fence and a huge boulder 5 metres either end of the plane but unscathed. Marcus landed my other plane in the ravine between 3 bushes, but also amazingly unscathed. Alls well. Unfortunately for marcus a flap servo failure forced him out of the last round.

We ended up flying 8 rounds and everyone stuffed up at least 1 flight.

So with no dropped scores it boiled down to who made the smallest stuff up.

In the end an f3b plane and it's very experienced pilot made the most of the conditions, so it's congratulations to 

1st Gerry Carter 7714.3

2nd Jim Houdalakis 7698.6 9

3rd  Daniel Haskell 7566.5

 flight_scores_open_thermal_feb_2020.pdf

 overall_results_open_thermal_feb_2020.pdf

Jim and his Perfection

I can’t remember having better conditions for flying RC gliders. The day was perfect.

As usual, the forecast wind direction, SE to SW, must have been for somewhere else. We set out the winches towards the south. Launched with a light ENE breeze all day.

But that didn’t matter. The sun was out, it was warm, not raining, gentle breeze, good friends and lots of thermals.

All this was enjoyed exclusively by just three pilots. We organised things so that we self-timed and flew seven heats across the day. There were some heats where finding lift took a bit of searching but nobody was really troubled to get their full ten minutes. Gerry’s last flight was short not because he lacked height but because he gave too much of it away too soon. A good dose of sink on landing approach didn’t help. This also dropped Gerry to third place, having held on to second spot for most of the day.

At the finish –

1^st Jim Houdalakis

2^nd Marcus Stent

3^rd Gerry Carter

 otnov19_overall.pdf

otnov19_flightscores.pdf

Cheers,

Gerry

Gerry and his Shooter

Gerry, Marcus (Pike Perfect) and Jim