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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