Open Thermal #1 Digger's Rest 14/09/2014

Hi all,
A beautiful sunny and unusually calm spring day greeted us for the first round in the RCGA Open Thermal league for the new season.
Usually this time of year means flying in a hurricane and full ballast but not so today, our biggest issue was wind direction, where we made the mistake of listening to the forecast, and managed to be setup in the wrong direction for downwind launches all day long. However with the generally calm conditions this wasn't a big issue. It wasn't always easy to find lift, and occasionally the cycles were quite far apart, so i think everyone had at least one get out of jail flight from down low. 

Despite the rain earlier in the week the ground was very hard, making for big bounces if coming in too fast and steep or big slides if coming in too fast and shallow. I watched Theo impressively and loudly bounce off the peg holding down the spot to land at 96. After pulling a flap servo out of his perfection, Dave Hobby flew his f3b pike precision very well, in light conditions, in his last few flights, until an unfortunate slide through landing. All was relatively straight forward until the very last heat,  when a 10 knot sea breeze kicked in, and the last heat of pilots had to launch downwind. It was quite the challenge to get any sort of launch height.  Rod managed to get the best launch and surfed the breeze and fast moving lift to win the heat.

It was good to see our newest member to join our ranks Bob Wilson steadily improve as the day progressed to put in some solid flights by the end of the day. 

Final standings were:

1st Jim Houdalakis      6992.8

2nd Theo Arvanitakis  6984.2

3rd Rod Watkins         6975.5

openthermal1_overall_results_14092014.pdf

openthermal1_flight_scores_14092014.pdf

PS Thanks to everyone who helped me out running the event, 

Jim Houdalakis

RCGA

Field at Lunch time

Theo, Jim, Rod and young Harrison Watkins laying out the landing tape