Flight two is done and dusted.
For the afternoon we were out in Haga where the winds are fickle and the frustration can be high. For the task we had a fly in followed by a watership down.
The game today was to time your approach to the fly in so that you did not arrive before the hare balloon that was going to launch for the watership down. Once you dropped the first marker for the fly in you then had to chase the hare balloon and drop a marker at the target laid out where they landed.
It is a fun sequence of tasks and one I have not seen for some time.
As happens in Haga the winds were shifting the whole time as we looked for a launch site. It was predicted to swing around to the west and indeed did about 15 minutes into the launch period. A quick relocation and some more pi-balls had us in a position I was happy with for the fly in.
While we were still sorting out land owner permission the hare balloon launched from the fly in goal and we briefly saw it from just over 2 km away before it dropped down onto the surface again. The race was on. We had to get airborne early enough to see where the hare landed and be able to get to his landing spot before the winds all changed again near sunset.
In 15 minutes we had everything out of the truck and were airborne. Unfortunately we were also flying south of where I wanted to be.
We passed by the Fly In goal 800m to the south then a further 400m to the south of the Hare balloon.
Looking back we could see the other balloons that took off a bit further back and only 5 minutes later got a better shift back to the left and had a clean run at both goals. I will be in the bottom few results for both of the tasks this afternoon.
Bugger.
So, that is day one. We have a welcome party with the Mayor tonight and a chance to dull the pain with quality Japanese beer so we are relaxed and ready for the morning!
A picture says so much more and as such I have also prepared some screen captures from the map showing my flights. They are on my other Tablet PC so will upload them later on when I get more time.
