Now that's what I like about contests. Interesting things happen!
Rick
At 01:29 AM 9/28/2004 -0400, Phil Barnes wrote:
>-----Original Message----- >From: Anker Berg-Sonne
>but I wonder what happened to Jose and especially >Mark. Jose is flying his MH-32 Mantis really well, and I thought Mark was >right up with the winners.
>The only "interesting" incident was when one of the sportsmen's Manti lost a >tail on launch.
Anker, you must have missed the most interesting thing that happened on Saturday. It's also the thing that explains what happened to Mark (and maybe Jose, I'm not sure).
It all began with round six. Mike Lachowski and John Jenks put a minute on me in that round by flying way off to some thermal that I didn't know about. That was enough to knock me out of contention for first and also put me in a mood for shoveling dirt on those who were now in the lead. After that round Tom Kiesling kindly pointed out that I could probably achieve higher launches if I stayed on the line a little longer.
That brings us to the seventh and final round with a devilishly dangerous 15 minute task. I stepped up to the winches announcing to all who were within earshot that they were now dealing with a wounded animal (me) and they better be careful. With Tom Kiesling's advice in mind I stayed on the winch line a little longer this time. Now, Tom didn't tell me to dive too deep and too long on the zoom but my timing was thrown off by doing the launch a little differently than I had all day, so you guessed it, I snagged the winch line on the pull up from the zoom. The next thing I saw was the plane doing a couple fast, violent snap rolls with the winch line somehow attached to parts unknown of the model. Meanwhile, John Hauf was dutifully pedaling down the winch line (just like at the NATS, no retrievers, wind the chutes down to the turnarounds after launch), unaware that anything was amiss. John wouldn't have been standing on that winch pedal had he known that my model was still snagged on the line but it turns out that his actions actually freed my model from the winch line. The cost of freeing my model from the winch line was the loss of my rudder which was seen to be fluttering to the ground as the model flew peacefully away.
I had about ten or twenty seconds to curse loudly and bemoan my humiliating situation before realizing that although I was only at about 150' of altitude and without a rudder, I was nevertheless in a rather nice thermal. While the other three members of my flight group took their full launches and ran off to parts unknown in search of a thermal, I merrily circled away and climbed ever higher. All of my turns were awkward and uncoordinated but with all that lift, who cares about coordination? My course of action was now clear. I would stay with that thermal until the rest of the flight group was on the ground or I could no longer see the model. For the next six or seven minutes I flew the model and tracked the thermal as best I could while attempting to get my timer to understand that I really wanted to know what the other guys in my flight group were doing. By the time that was all sorted out and the other guys in the group had landed, my model was but a tiny speck on the horizon. It was now safe to leave that thermal and return to the field. The model was so high and so far downwind at that point that no one else could see it unless I pitched up momentarily to show the bottom of the model. I finished the 15 minute task and even got some landing points, all without a rudder.
So that's what happened to Mark (and maybe Jose). He/they had the misfortune of being in a flight group with a very lucky wounded animal.
Phil
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