"Back to 100% again finally, was getting a bit tired of it (the cold) but ok now.
Pre launch is a wee bit nervy if we dont have a solid call and in the middle rounds they were deliberately running the juniors in the calmer parts of the day to make it easier for them until i think someone pointed out the amount of seniors now onto 2nd or 3rd airplanes too. So now its back to alternating rounds. Tomorrow we start with snr rd11 and so on, should be finished by about 2pm local so 11pm NZ will see who made the flyoff. Then i think they are planning on flying 2 of the flyoff rounds tomorrow afternoon, the other 4 saturday morning. We rebuilt scotts broken model (boom broke in half during the zoom, just failed, not a midair) after flying finished yesterday, a couple of bottles of cyano, some balsa, carbon, builders bog and other bits and we gave it a pretty hard tow before we left the field tonight and it survived ok so he might use it tomorrow. Amazing what can be done in a short time by a determined bunch of guys.
We are a bit nervous about tomorrow, JW was looking at the weather etc when we left and thinks tomorrow might take a little longer to warm up and kick off thermals and we are in early rounds but we have launch height advantage anyway so.......
Supra stabs are blowing up all over the place but people are pushing pretty hard and they weren't meant for these conditions, DP dives too deep in the bucket and pulls out HARD = failure. I've instructed the towers to back off a little bit on my model in the wind but its fairly safe as I'm a nana in pushing over so as not to blow stabs up.
10th round was heaps of carnage and low scores for some people. The thermals in the wind are very tight, you cruise to the expected area after launch and wait for one to hit, the moment it does you wrap into a turn on it and dont let go until it does one of 2 things.....1. The thermal goes "PUFF" and disappears after a gain of maybe 30ft and 2-3 circles or......2. You start to have difficulty seeing the model clearly 3/4km downwind and 1000ft high after 20 circles. When it hits you never know which it will be and you might have to have a go at a few of #1 before you get a #2. Then theres the landing traffic to deal with and the fact the spots are maybe only 50m in front of the tent/tree line making a high short approach reqd. Fun, fun, fun....you betcha!!!! When we get it right its a blast and today all 3 of us got good calls from JW and we skied out bigtime, the frustrating part is that those who dont still often get their time by sloping the tree line which just doesnt seem right when its supposed to be a THERMAL contest!
Anyway, a tad after midnight so up in less than 6hrs for the bus the field (the Dutch team is also in the same hotel as us, we have a 22 seater bus between us complete with driver who stays here too, we can't pronounce the drivers real name so have cristened him Hank for the week, he and the bus is ours to use as req'd, typical day is leaving hotel 6.45am, leaving field 8.30pm for the 45 minutes each way drive) and I'm finally off to bed to dream of big thermals only for NZ tomorrow.
Catch ya, Les.
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