BERG was very poorly represented at the HTL #3 at Silverton on Sunday. I heard that Piet's mom passed away during the week - our condolences, Piet. Peter Joffe was house hunting and I believe Evan was moving house. Could the rest of the team all been furiously building their scale models for next weekend? Well, the HTLs are always great fun and you guys missed a good one.
Volney kindly matrixed me in with Hugh Edmunds (unfortunately had to drop out at the last minute) and Gert Nieuwoudt from Secunda. The weather for the day was very challenging. The morning started out beautifully with an ever so light breeze which by lunch time had strengthened to a howling gale - it's not often my gazeebo gets blown over!
Thermals were tight and strong - we often saw five models in the same thermal and of course this took it's toll with two thermalling mid-air collisions. As the thermals began moving through very quickly we had to follow them further downwind. A good few pilots got caught landing out downwind.
Rodney's model had it's tree magnets turned on and Chris had a particularly bad day damaging one of his models in a mid-air and losing the other in the big trees at the river. After the contest we took a walk down to the river and it's hard to believe the size of those trees. The model wasn't found.
John Monk did a great job of CDing the contest until lunch time when Volney took over.
Martie again did a great boerewors roll and salad lunch and kept our energy levels up with her sweets and cooldrinks (and beers after flying). The day's top scorer was Craig Goodrum. Despite making at least one bad decision when I spotted him hunting around overhead while the rest of his group were specked out downwind, he managed to pull it off every time. Second place went to Conrad Klintworth and third to Paul Carnall. I placed a respectable 5th with my little Sagitta and Gert finished in 9th place with his new scratch built Supra.
Some great landing shots of Conrad on the left and Johan on the right making it look so easy. And if they can do it, then so can I ...
Keep an eye on the MGA blog for full results and the next contest is at the BERG field in June - don't miss it.
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