Wednesday 13 July 2011

BMFA Nationals 2011

It was pretty weird having to travel over 400 miles to my 'home' slope for the first time.  And also pretty weird taking two planes that I hadn't flown in months.  No worries, I studiously arrived a day early to get some much needed practice, which rather predictably ended up as watching the rain.
Fortunately though all that practice came in really handy on day one, which was spent entirely, exclusively and uninterruptedly... watching the rain; and no one was better at it than me!
We met at the Wrecker car park on day two where we were sat on top of the low cloud, something I've not seen in the twenty odd years I've been watching low cloud at the Bwlch. Have a look at the photos.
The day's flying was typical back of the Wrecker; bloody horrible. Very thermic, bumpy and very difficult to get any sort of rhythm.
Lots of people flew really well, various people had bits of good air, some people showed they need a bit or practice (me!) and finally the results panned out as shown below.
Condolences to those who flew well but got nothing for their efforts.
Personally I think we need to look again at the World Champs qualifying process.  Like never before the skills required to be competitive will be very slope specific and that slope will be nothing like the back of the Wrecker in thermic conditions.  Also the concept of running a qualifier that includes people who have no interest in attending is just weird!
Some photos and the results are below.



1 Simon Thornton 6541.57
2 Mark Redsell 6502.31
3 Kevin Newton 6479.83
4 Martin Newnham 6334.7
5 Peter Gunning 6292.7
6 Joel West 6284.91
7 Adam Richardson 6223.19
8 Mike Evans 6164.88
9 Greg Dakin 6152.25
10 Keith Woods 6111.02
11 Clayton Landells 6017.09
12 Frank Hulton 5939.95
13 Andrzej Tabero 5873.03
14 Rich Bago 5809.14
15 Mick Walsh 5802.42
16 Paul Middleton 5770.05
17 Scott Ravenscroft 5744.77
18 Mark Abbotts 5720.39
19 Dave Rumble 5717.33
20 Jon Edison 5491.28
21 Ian Mason 5386.61
22 Paul Upton 5383.18
23 Tom Foreman 5319.04
24 Paul Stubly 5264.55
25 Tony Robertson 5198.63
26 Peter Burgess 5176.49
27 Jason Bioletti 4964.13
28 Mark Treble 4800.78
29 John Treble 4782.38