rdwoebke
Oct 21, 2007, 11:09 AM
The Cincinattii Soaring Society did a great job today of running the 28th annual Great Pumpkin Fest at Voice of America park. This is at least the third time I have attended this event, and is often the norm I suspect, it started out a bit chilly and then got very moderate.
I arrived at the field about 8:45 after driving up from Santa Claus and met up with Kentucky Glider. It was KG's first contest and after registering and assembling my Psyko I tried to go over some ground rules for him. The plan for the day was that I would opperate the winch and throw his Gentle Lady.
Pilots meeting was at about 9:15 and at the pilots meeting we learned there were 20 pilots in attendence. Several folks would have loved to convert that into a L5 win. This left us with 4 flight groups of 5 pilots of seeded man on man competition. 6 rounds were flown and tasks would be 8, 10, 10, 10, 10, 13.
I won't go into excessive detail on all of my flights. I had some good ones and some bad ones (I had an off field landing by about 25 feet in round 3). I did manage one max flight, hitting 9:57 with a decent landing in round 2. This flight I worked a bubble I found about a minute into the flight when I was somewhat low down wind over the houses. I was not great high but not terribly low and Marc Gellart came by and gave me some well appreaciated advice. I'm making a habit of getting far out and not great high and getting good advice from L5s... :-) I also managed to win two other flight groups.
The wind was hitting this kind of ridge line that was up wind and to the right, perhaps 700 or so feet up wind. I had been to a real windy contest at VOA before and that was working then too, but I did not have a plane that could really punch up into it well. This time I could punch into it, but I was not a huge fan of that line. It absolutely worked, but the higher you could launch the better off you would be. For me it worked OK in round 1 and I used it in round 4 to take the top duration in my flight group. I do need to work on my launches. I'm proud to say they were very nice, safe, and straight, but I'm not zooming terribly good. I know I'm still too tempted to float off the line.
Kentucky Glider's Gentle Lady struggled a bit with the winch. I used to have a Gentle Lady (it was badly damaged in a training incident, but I do still have parts of it) and flew it at contests for years. For some reason we could not figure out what was going on today, but we had a lot of pop offs. KG did have some good landings though and eventually the CDs suggested we setup KG's high start and that we did and he had a nice final round. Kudos to the CDs for letting us setup a high start.
I also did some timing for Dave Campbell and he timed for me some as well. He was flying good but had some bad luck on one round. He put the hurt on me (and the rest of us in that group) in the final round when I tried to follow some lift down wind and it did not work out and he was able to work the hill a bit longer than I thought would work and then a thermal broke off the hill.
Marc won with is Zenith XL. Man, that guy is really good. Launches to the moon he does. He did get hurt by Sieb in one round but otherwise was just about perfect. I always thought he was a really good pilot, but I think over the last few years he has gotten even better somehow....
Sieb was 2nd with his Fazer. I got to time for him in the last round (and throw the plane, my first time throwing a molded ship). Unfortunately that flight group was a major annomely on the day in that the entire sky was up, and all 5 top pilots maxed that round, so there was nothing that could be done to make ground on the rest of the pilots except Steve nailing a solid landing on that flight moving him up a spot (I think).
Speaking of landings, the LZ was a bit tough on folks. Some kind of rolling turbulence off a tree caused a lot of guys to not get the 100s they usually would. I did OK in the LZ and have been getting the hang of landing the Psyko. Still have a lot of room to improve though.
I came in 10th out of 20. Good enough for just under 800 LSF points. Now I have 4,000 points with 4 contests. I need 6,000 points and 6 contests, so I'm on pace if I can just get two more 1,000 pointers.
Some pictures are attached of the winners. And some pictures of some planes coming in for landing. There is a picture of my Psyko and Kentucky Glider's Gentle Lady. Speaking of Kentucky Glider, every CSS Pumpkin contest they have a kind of infamous award for the last place finisher. Today being his first contest he won this award. I posted a picture of that too.
Ryan
I arrived at the field about 8:45 after driving up from Santa Claus and met up with Kentucky Glider. It was KG's first contest and after registering and assembling my Psyko I tried to go over some ground rules for him. The plan for the day was that I would opperate the winch and throw his Gentle Lady.
Pilots meeting was at about 9:15 and at the pilots meeting we learned there were 20 pilots in attendence. Several folks would have loved to convert that into a L5 win. This left us with 4 flight groups of 5 pilots of seeded man on man competition. 6 rounds were flown and tasks would be 8, 10, 10, 10, 10, 13.
I won't go into excessive detail on all of my flights. I had some good ones and some bad ones (I had an off field landing by about 25 feet in round 3). I did manage one max flight, hitting 9:57 with a decent landing in round 2. This flight I worked a bubble I found about a minute into the flight when I was somewhat low down wind over the houses. I was not great high but not terribly low and Marc Gellart came by and gave me some well appreaciated advice. I'm making a habit of getting far out and not great high and getting good advice from L5s... :-) I also managed to win two other flight groups.
The wind was hitting this kind of ridge line that was up wind and to the right, perhaps 700 or so feet up wind. I had been to a real windy contest at VOA before and that was working then too, but I did not have a plane that could really punch up into it well. This time I could punch into it, but I was not a huge fan of that line. It absolutely worked, but the higher you could launch the better off you would be. For me it worked OK in round 1 and I used it in round 4 to take the top duration in my flight group. I do need to work on my launches. I'm proud to say they were very nice, safe, and straight, but I'm not zooming terribly good. I know I'm still too tempted to float off the line.
Kentucky Glider's Gentle Lady struggled a bit with the winch. I used to have a Gentle Lady (it was badly damaged in a training incident, but I do still have parts of it) and flew it at contests for years. For some reason we could not figure out what was going on today, but we had a lot of pop offs. KG did have some good landings though and eventually the CDs suggested we setup KG's high start and that we did and he had a nice final round. Kudos to the CDs for letting us setup a high start.
I also did some timing for Dave Campbell and he timed for me some as well. He was flying good but had some bad luck on one round. He put the hurt on me (and the rest of us in that group) in the final round when I tried to follow some lift down wind and it did not work out and he was able to work the hill a bit longer than I thought would work and then a thermal broke off the hill.
Marc won with is Zenith XL. Man, that guy is really good. Launches to the moon he does. He did get hurt by Sieb in one round but otherwise was just about perfect. I always thought he was a really good pilot, but I think over the last few years he has gotten even better somehow....
Sieb was 2nd with his Fazer. I got to time for him in the last round (and throw the plane, my first time throwing a molded ship). Unfortunately that flight group was a major annomely on the day in that the entire sky was up, and all 5 top pilots maxed that round, so there was nothing that could be done to make ground on the rest of the pilots except Steve nailing a solid landing on that flight moving him up a spot (I think).
Speaking of landings, the LZ was a bit tough on folks. Some kind of rolling turbulence off a tree caused a lot of guys to not get the 100s they usually would. I did OK in the LZ and have been getting the hang of landing the Psyko. Still have a lot of room to improve though.
I came in 10th out of 20. Good enough for just under 800 LSF points. Now I have 4,000 points with 4 contests. I need 6,000 points and 6 contests, so I'm on pace if I can just get two more 1,000 pointers.
Some pictures are attached of the winners. And some pictures of some planes coming in for landing. There is a picture of my Psyko and Kentucky Glider's Gentle Lady. Speaking of Kentucky Glider, every CSS Pumpkin contest they have a kind of infamous award for the last place finisher. Today being his first contest he won this award. I posted a picture of that too.
Ryan