RCGA Thermal (TH5) 10 Jan 16

dan_haskell

We had a warm day for the first thermal competition of 2016. OK, it was HOT. But that didn't stop everybody having a good time.

Our CD, Daniel Haskell (pictured above), had us flying to a 10 minute thermal task in 11 minutes working time. This changed the game in that sandbagging wasn't really possible. And, in the event of a pop off or a line break, there was a good chance that at least some potential flight time would be lost. In our situation, where pilots were given extra preparation time if needed, it didn't save any time over the 10 minute flight in 12 minutes rules. It would be different in a larger, longer and more rigidly structured competition.

Fourteen pilots entered and we soon got underway. The easterly breeze brought with it rather tricky thermal conditions. Not quite so easy to find, even harder to follow. So that made the early part of the day pretty interesting. Later on the sea breeze kicked in, but not too strongly, and the thermals were much easier to find, although the cycles were much longer.

Bad luck award of the day goes to Jim Houdalakis. It seems that Jim cracked a wing joiner on an earlier landing (he heard it crack) and on his next launch the model came to pieces. To make things worse, this was his only complete model, so he didn't have a backup on hand. Being very keen he set off homewards to get more models, but didn't make it. The police had blocked some major roads to trap some bad guys that they were chasing (not Jim) and created a massive traffic snarl, blocking Jim's way. So he returned to the field and helped out for the rest of the day.

Good luck award goes to Gerry. He flew a model with similar underwing markings for around two minutes before realising that either his model was off the air or that it wasn't his model. No use flying something that wouldn't respond so he looked around for another model to fly and found one, not too far away, cruising along quite nicely, and with sufficient height to fly out the time. So, not being too choosy at this point, he flew this model for the rest of the round and claimed it as his after landing.

The scores of the top pilots were very close for most of the day, so it only took one mistake to quickly drop in the rankings. This happened quite a bit in round 6. The one pilot who didn't make any serious mistakes all day was Marcus and so he finished first. Theo put in a strong performance after lunch to overtake quite a few pilots and took second place. Hugh Blackburn put in a solid performance all day but due to his round 6 score, ended just 10 points behind Theo to take third place.

1. Marcus Stent 5992.8
2. Theo Arvanitakis 5845.1
3. Hugh Blackburn 5835.3

overall_results.pdf flight_scores.pdf landing_results.pdf

bob_wilson