An afternoon flight, I had almost forgotten what they were.Finally the wind has turned around from the south for a safe and predictable afternoon flight. As always it was a fly into a scoring area and the marker was to be a gravity drop. In fact we have not had a single free throw all week.
The task had a limited scoring area so getting in the "box" about 80m wide and 500m long was the only way to get a good result.
From this direction things are very predictable and as always taking off from the south east makes for a nice flight in at around 2000 ft. It is almost like clockwork when the afternoon breeze blows in this direction - at least for those of us who have flown here before. Every time people get caught out by taking off too far south and slip off to the east as the afternoon goes on.
So with such brazen talk of local knowledge you would think a winning result was in my next paragraph. Sadly not.
As luck would have it I ended up in traffic again and did not make my decent until slightly too late. The thin edge of the scoring box was the side that we were all approaching the target so you had a narrow window to get down from 2000ft to turn left into the scoring zone.
Fortunately I know the rules by now and knew that if I could get close enough to throw it in to the scoring area I would receive a penalty of 50m added to my result. In the worst case scenario I will be 200 points better off than the folks who missed altogether.
There are some other things that come into play here so we have to hope that less than half of the field got a result. I did not see many markers so It should all work out.
It is an interesting end to the competition. The results have been all messed up with lots of people getting bad scores this morning and then who knows what happened tonight. The scores have been slow getting published so no one really knows who is winning.
It will all come down to tomorrow morning and the last flight.
Tonight is the Sanyamachi party where we get treated to food, beer and entertainment in a sports field. Interestingly you never see the Japanese pilots here - maybe it is a trap for the foreign pilots so we are not as sharp on the last morning? Anyhow it is good fun and ends early enough. Watch out for the push button sake - you push a button on the base of the can and it heats up for you. If you don't like drinking warm sake, it makes a great hand warmer.
The collection of people to party with this year is very small so I expect it will be an early night. Timotey (and Tem chan) where are you? Saga is not the same without sake partners.
