As mentioned earlier in the blog, John Kagan of all people took a day one lead with some impressive times in standard catapult. His pair of 43's set the mark. Then a late night lucky shot of 47 seconds (video posted earlier) set a new standard in standard. It forced Rob and I to do some modification work Friday night.
We both did some test flying Saturday morning and had improved to match John's times. A Saturday night show down was in the works! Rob pulled to within 9/10ths of a second, but eventually ran out of flights to close on John.
I decided to fly my standard cat in unlimited and posted a 46 and a 43, bettering John's times in standard by three seconds. I then went on to hit the same light SIX TIMES IN A ROW (despite moving my launch placement each time Rob) to fail in efforts to catch John in standard. Sadly, he was able to top us all with only four flights. Lucky John. He got to tell his new girlfriend how awesome of a glider flier he is yet again....
At least I had him well covered in unlimited, or so I thought. His first three flights looked good, but once again his fourth was a death nail, and I will offer one shiny Sacagawea dollar to anyone that ever betters it in that building with a standard 12" catapult. It was a perfect flight for that building. His launch rolled out above the girders, flew between them, narrowly avoided two different hanging lights and then just grazed below the girder it went through on the first circle for a time of 51.3 seconds. I am still shaking my head about it. I cannot determine if John is that lucky or that good. He simply outclassed Rob and I by a large margin, and we were giving it all we had. Look at the individual flight scores and you will see it was feast or famine as we started pushing launches to the limit of safety.
In HLG, Rob, for the second time ever beat me handily. He had a really nice glider tailor built to the site. I tried to recycle a Kent glider with little success. He got some face time in as well.
For future reference this is a straight launch left glide (or right glide) site suited to smaller gliders in the 10 gram range. Next year. Next year....(Yes there will be a next year, bigger and better we are told, so keep your eyes and ears open!
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