Contest 3 of the

Y2K JR / Airsail F3B Series,

hosted by MPMAC at Matamata,

on July 1-2, 2000.

CD: Warwick Gatland

Summary, Round 1, Round 2, Round 3

Saturday morning dawned cool but fine and saw us setting up the course and winches in a downwind direction - the forecast and cloud drift both indicated north-east, while the ground level breeze was south-west. This made the first duration slot interesting, and it was won with a flight-time of only 6:39. However the second duration slot saw monster lift as the nor-easter converged with the south-westerly directly over the field! The nor-easter won out and set-in for the rest of the weekend, justifying the decision to set-up in that direction. From this point on the air was often extremely bumpy and lift very difficult to find and work. Even when found the lift was generally in very small, tight pockets which came and went very rapidy, surrounded by plenty of strong sink. Genuine thermals were few and far between, and late in the day some of the biggest sink we've ever encountered came through: launch height to ground in 90 seconds - no joke! A quick relaunch and a low-level encounter with probably the only piece of lift around gave Dave Morgan a 8:57 flight - hammering the rest of the slot by 4 minutes!

Needless to say the conditions were very testing and resulted in some big variations in duration scores... Given the tricky conditions distance flights were pretty good, with most slots being won with 16-18 laps. Speed times weren't overly great with Dave Larsen's 18.17 the fastest on this first day. A lack of practice was evident, especially in the first speed round where conditions were probably the best.

On Sunday we woke to a howling gale and spent an hour or so hovering around the windmeter watching the peak gusts climb to over 60kph (30+ knots)! The wind eventually backed off enough to allow a start and we flew distance and speed to complete round 3 before the rain arrived. Conditions still weren't pleasant and contributed to two almost identical crashes when heavily ballasted models stalled, then snapped, when pulled too tight at base A in distance. The wind did provide good launch height which enabled Chris Kaiser to set the fastest speed time of the contest with 17.73 seconds.

The wind also contributed to an unpleasant incident when a turn-around pulley pulled out on launch and came 3/4 of the way back to the winches. Luckily no one was in the way of the projectile, but it could have led to serious injury or even worse. I think we all need to treat this as a wake-up call - check your equipment regularly, and use decent sized pegs. At least two stakes 10mm diameter by 450mm long should be the absolute minimum! Standard tent pegs simply aren't big enough to hold against the sort of tension an F3B model can generate on tow.