Mike Minty sends us the following:

A lovely bright sunny day greeted the 17 members who turned up for the event …… only problem was the wind which was variable and insisted on coming mainly from the car park despite the CD and Flight Director (Dave Pound and Mike Minty) having laid the bungee out for wind from the dam! Click [read more] to see the full article

So it was decided to run a round of Electric first 'cos you can chuck’em in any direction you want. There were some good flights in that round, very close to the target time of 5 minutes (in fact 7 of the 15 flights were within 10 secs of the time). The best flight was David Foster with a 5’ 06” flight from a 29 sec motor run and a perfect (within 1m) spot landing. Close behind him was Doug Radford, David Menzies and John Channon. Drop outs included Mike minty whose foamy decided not to listen to the Tx after it got 100m away and Col simpson whose plane gave off large clouds of smoke!

Round 1 of Glider followed, with the bungee having been turned around, but there was little lift and Stan Begg, Graham Swalwell, Steve McMahon and James Freiss were down in less than 2 minutes. But then to loud supporting cheers (like “jammy bas@@@d” or “bring your own lift did you?”) Mike Minty found it and soared up for a 5’ 01” flight that should have had a good spot too but he put the spoilers on too early. Doug Radford impressed everyone with his “spear” landing that got him 30 points but left the plane stuck vertically in the ground. (Splendid work Doug - good to see someone taking their competition seriously - Ed.) David Menzies got a re-fly allowed. Somehow on the way up the bungee line got wrapped around the tail but luckily he got it down without damage.

Round 2 of Electric saw good flight times again (well what do you expect when you can turn the motor on!) with 8 of the now 12 fliers getting within 10 secs of the flight target including Peter Papas with 4’ 59” from his foamy delta. Best flight was from Steve who did 5’ 03” from 28secs of motor with David and Baz Campbell (with his battered old Komet!!) close behind. Robert Kaley gort a good 5’ 06” from only 17 secs of motor but missed the landing points. Motor times ranged fro 15 to 54 secs and every one of those gets deducted of your flight score of course.

Peter Papa's Stryker... ummm glider...
Peter Papa's Stryker... ummm... glider....

Round 2 of glider saw generally improved flight times but only 3 of the now 11 fliers got over 4 mins of time With Mike again topping with 4’ 58” - just pipping John at 5’ 03” for his (and so far) the best flight of the comp. James' glider is really a small chuckie and does it go up on the bungee! As opposed to Robert's which seems to struggle up at a very slow rate. Stan, having managed to catch a tree in Round 1, showed us how to stall this time, we counted 17 before it landed! Mark ter Laak struggled with a HOB 2T that was new to him but did stirling work when the bungee got caught in the trees.

Last round of Electric and flight times were all up (even Col got one as he borrowed a speed controller from Peter to replace his burned-out one) with 9 competitors within 10 secs of the target and 2 5’ 01”s one of which was Tom “The Burglar” Sparkes. Best flight was David Menzies with 4’ 55” from 23 secs of motor and a perfect landing but David F, Steve, Mark and Peter P were close behind.

Last round of glider saw Mike top with David M close behind having “milked” his approach to get 30 landing points when everyone thought he would fall short. Graham did a lovely “spear” landing to pick up his 30 landing points while Stan did an excellent job of hanging on the line to try and maximise launch height – he has a releasable tow hook!

Graham's spear landing

Graham's "spear'" landing.

When the points were all added up the results showed

Glider

Mike Minty - 1

Robert Kaley - 2

David Menzies - 3

Steve McMahon - 4

Electric

David Foster - 1

David Menzies - 2

Steve MacMahon - 3

John Channon - 4

The Morts Mug trophy for the best single glider flight (max score is 350 points) looked like going to John with his 327 in Round 2 but then Mike just snuck in with 328 in the last round!

Thanks to all and particularly to Zoren Dimovski for the huge amount of bungee retrieval and timing that he did!