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

Welsh Open news

Thanks to T9 the first of the Welsh Open sponsors are in...

Pike Precision...

Only a few weeks away :-))))

Scottish Summer League 4

My first competition in my new home of Scotland was great fun.  Even the 2.5m walk to the NNW face of West Lomond was welcome exercise and richly rewarded with a bunch of good sub 40 second runs.  Dave Watson had FTD with an excellent 34.00.
The standard of flying was really high and those that got thermals certainly capitalised on them.
There's a lot of coastline around here... I can feel some exploring coming on!


1 Kevin Newton 8359.21
2 Peter Gunning 8335.40
3 David Watson 8328.09
4 Mike McCracken 7953.88
5 Ian Stewart 7805.60
6 Ewan Maxwell 7653.68
7 Craig Maxwell 4123.42
8 David Loomes 1681.58

La Muela - the last few days

Some photos from the last few days.  I'll be doing a write up of the event for QEFI and I'll add a few words here soon about the Fosa.  I'll also post the scores for an impromptu F3F that 10 of us from four countries had at La Muela the day after the main comp.
Home tomorrow; via Inaki's place and vineyard :-)