This morning we were woken by the pagers letting us know to go back to sleep as there was no flight. It is also likely that this afternoon will be missed as well.
The good news is that the ground will be soft and muddy for a few days so even when we do get to fly it will be a challenge to fins a clean place to launch or land.
Results for the first morning are out and we have done ok considering the huge mistake. As expected, my result on the Fly In was not all that great and would have been worth about 500 points. With the distance penalty it took me to 2nd last place on that task and a huge 32 points out of 1000. Oh well.
Results are here.
The track image is here so you can see how the flight was flown. With those big red rings you may wonder how I launched on the
wrong side of the line? So do I. In reality it was just a stupid twist of technology tied up with a brain fade. The car computer for road navigation did not have the limits drawn on it and I was using it to pick the launch site. The flight computer was being used to look at wind data and for choosing the PDG at 316 and I was only checking the distance from the PDG to the launch site thinking that 10km was miles away and there was no way were out that far from the FIN. A really dumb noob mistake I have not made in maybe 8 years and not likely to do again in a hurry.The good news is that I am in 19th place despite that and had I not made the technical error, would have been more like the top 10 even with the poor Fly in result of 25m. With 62 competitors the scoring is harsh and some good results are not getting good points. On the last task, my 5m was 8th place and got 830 points. A 16m result would only get 500 points so things are tight at the top.
I expect that everyone will slip up so the chance to make up points will always be there as a poor result will loose you a lot of points very quickly. At the top end, it will be a good fight and after one flight I am close enough to join in.
Edwin is the next highest Aussie at 24th place and Paul is at 30th. Andrew was hit by the very tight results on all targets and taking off with me and getting the distance penalty did not help at all.
Paul has been penalized for a midair collision after the last target. Details are still sketchy so I won't really speculate here other than he told me he was climbing slowly (about 200 ft/min) and was hit by a descending balloon. Others have said he was climbing faster than that. In any case, being the climbing balloon generally works against you and with GPS loggers on all balloons the track log would have been reviewed and a determination made based on the evidence from that.
I am not sure if he is going to protest or take it further. His result on the particular task was not great before the penalty so my personal view is that it is not worth the mental effort to fight for a few hundred points. On the other hand if we are sitting around in the rain for another day it gives him something to do.
Fingers crossed the rain stops and we can get on with it.
