Jon, David, Jim, Marcus, Hugh and Gerry capturing the spirit of the event. Brett on the camera of course!

The 19/20th Jan 2013 saw us flying in 2 fantastic days of F3K competition and it was 4 events in 1....

1. It was the F3K World Championship Selection Trials which are the result of both days flying including droppers as per the FAI rules.

2. It was the Victorian State F3K Championships which are the result of both days flying without droppers

3. It was the F3K RCGA league event #4 on Saturday.

4. It was the F3K RCGA league event #5 on Sunday.

We had 7 competitors enjoy the best conditions of flying the F3Kers had seen at Diggers Rest for nearly a year. Suturday was 22 degrees C., breezy and thermally and Sunday was 28 degrees C., light winds and thermally. The CD for the evet was Gerry Carter and a huge thanks goes out to him for running an excellent event. He also gave up flying is some of the rounds so we could run some single groups of AULD. Thanks Gerry for the secrifice to make the event all that much more competitive. We completed 12 rounds on Saturday and 10 rounds on Sunday to make it a total of 22 rounds of flying.  A great way to select a WC team!

Jon started Saturday well by working his XXL nicely in the breezy conditions. Hugh and Brett had 90grams of in their Salpeters and put in some excellent flights. Marcus managed his down wind runs to perfection and scrapped back in the box by only a few meters on 3 occasions. Marcus won the first day (League #4) convincingly with Jon second and Hugh third.

Hugh was the the master of the light conditions on Sunday with his Sapleter and often worked bubbles from very low altitudes. David Pratley and Jim Houdalakis started to really get going with their Blaster 3's and started picking up regular 1000 points. One of David's highlights was making some big calls in Poker and taking points off Jon and Brett. Sundays (League 5) results saw Hugh first, Marcus second and Jon third. The battle for fourth, fifth and sixth was only separated by 76 points, with David finishing fourth, Brett fifth and Jim sixth. It was a close fought battle.

The overall results for the 2 days show that the the team for the F3K World Championships (for Denmark in July 2013) are:

                    1st Marcus Stent

                    2nd Hugh Blackburn

                    3rd Jon Day

Congratulations and well done!

It works out that the droppers had no effect on the final results and so these are also the place getters for the Victorian F3K State Titles.

The full results are in the attached links:

F3K_WC_Selection_Trials-Overall.pdf

f3k_wc_selection_trials-flight_scores.pdf

f3k_League_Event_4-Overall.pdf

f3k_league_event5-overall.pdf

A huge thanks go out to all the flyers and again to our CD Gerry for an excellent event flown with great spirit and sportsmanship. It was a fun weekend of flying.

Cheers,

Marcus 

I received some more photo's from Martin Simons who came out for a look... thank you!

Jim's Blaster 3 floats by after a high speed (launch) brush with the grass. Notice it hanging off the tail!

More photo's here..

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F3K#3 Diggers Rest,

I'm not sure how many times we have turned up to Diggers Rest for F3K and it has been on the FAI limit of wind, but Sunday was another one !

We still had 7 Pilots come along and enjoy the day.

Brett was the master of the day and was able to work the windy conditions better than the rest to end up the clear winner by a very large margin. Well Done Brett!

Hugh finished second and was flying his new XXL glider and he got better and better with it as the day went on.

Marcus finished third and had a mixed day of plane problems and minor incidents, but thoroughly enjoyed the day.

Gerry came fourth and had some great flights and seemed to be at one with the conditions.

Jim, Tim and Tom all started, but had to retire because of various problems. The great thing was they stayed around to help time for the remaining pilots and this meant that we could run the different F3K taks with one group per round. Thank you guy's!

A special thanks to Tim for taking on the CD role and helping run the day.

Cheers,

Marcus

f3k3_diggers_dec12_flight_scores.pdf

f3k3_diggers_dec12_overall_results.pdf

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Hi All,

We have kicked off the first event in the 2012/13 RCGA calendar with F3K (Hand Launch) at Royal Park and it was a great success. We had 8 pilots come along and enjoy the day. The weather forecast was not flash but the day turned out to be a warm, breezy and very flyable. When the sun came out it was even hot! It was a very difficult day from a thermalling point of view which made for some very low scores but there was enough lift around to sneak in some good times every now and again. Most people used minimal (or no) ballast because of the light lift, but it made penetrating back into the wind difficult so you had to judge the conditions well to avoid an out landing.

Some highlights for the day:

Tom Dupuche joined us for the first time (welcome Tom) with an ex Tim Lennon/Hugh Blackburn Twister 2 and improved as the day went on. A number of us ran launch and setup clinics at the lunch break for anyone still learning and this saw a big improvement in everyones launches as the day went on.

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