The forecast through the weekend had varied from awful, (high winds & rain) to pretty good, (light wind & sun). Even on Sat evening the forecast wind was borderline. Our CD decided to go ahead and try to run the Area Open E-Soaring event as per the calendar.
8 pilots turned out to fly, but Bill wasn’t feeling great and wasn’t sure if he was going to fly. An issue with the model then made up his mind for him and he didn’t fly!
The wind was blowing 8 – 10mph SE, with occasional heavier gusts. Paul set the event as 5 rounds of 8 mins, plus 20 points for the landing bonus if within the 15m radius circle. Zero score for landing outwith the field, basically the plateau we were flying on. This allowed for one discard round. As this was a championship event, there would then be a 2 round fly off for the top 2.
There was a fair mix of models, Ronnies Bitsa (Phoenix fuz & Radian wings), some E-PuRES, Insides, Introductions and Keiths big Xplorer. Tommy had to fly his Inside having cracked the fuz on his Friendly the day before and having not flown it for almost a year had a few issues getting back in to the groove with it, only managing 1 spot landing out of the 5, usually ending up just short.
Rd1 Sam got good air when most others, except Tim, weren’t finding good air.
Rd2 was much closer with only Paul, Tim & Tommy missing out on lift.
Rd3 Keith got away with everyone else lagging significantly behind
Rd4 Keith and Paul both got away, gaining identical scores and everyone else was almost half their times
Rd5 Paul took the top time. Keith was doing well until his final turn on landing when the model simply fell out of the sky off the plateau and getting a zero score. This had happened to a number of the others during the day, but all had ended up within the field, so only lost their landing bonus.
After the scores were tabulated and the discards taken out, Paul & Keith progressed through to the fly off.
Fly off RD1 was very close with both models making almost the full 8 minutes and very little in it. Paul winning by a few seconds.
Rd 2 was again almost fully flown out, with Paul again just taking the win and as a result the Area Open E-Soaring Championship (Boyd Trophy)
