St. Patty's Day HLG Contest -- March 17, 2001
by Adam Weston

Well, despite the weather forecasts, we had a great day outside at the first HLG contest of the year.  The National Weather Service should realize that SASS has a 3 year streak of dry contests going (knock on wood) maybe they can include our contest schedule in their forecast considerations!
It was actually a pretty good day, it was overcast most of the day, with a few slight breaks, just enough to kick off some thermals.  The wind came up briefly for a round our two and then died back down.  Round scores varied widely from one round to the next, with 4 minute flights one round and nothing more than 1 minute flights the next.  

At the onset we decided this was going to be a low key contest.  We started with two 'new' rounds, All Up Last Down.  This pitted 6 pilots at a time against each other.   The pilots would all launch simultaneously, fly as long as they could and then have to catch the plane, if you didn't catch it, you moved down a spot.  The top pilot got 1000, and the next got 833, then 667, 500, 333, and 167.  This scoring wasn't quite fair since for most rounds, even the bottom pilot would get a better score than 166.   This may work better with a bell curve type of score distribution... It was nice to not need timers for every person, just a couple of folks to start the round and keep track of what order everyone landed in.

The large number of 'own designs' that were at the contest was impressive.  There wasn't a single plane there that wasn't built in the Seattle area, and excluding Bruce's Terminator, they were all pretty much designed in Seattle as well!  Tim Johnson showed up with a new Wing-Launched plane (the Cosmos) and showed the rest of us how to do it!  His little plane just floated on the thermals, and was just the right plane for the day.  Adam flew his Ionosphere to good success, targeting the thermals well.   Phil had his latest Encore out for the first time, getting it ready for Poway in June.  It was good to see the usual gang out, and we all welcome Bill Henley into the fray for his first HLG contest!

Here is where the dust settled:

Door prizes were contributed by Thermal-Gromit Works (http://www.tgworks.com)

The next HLG will be Saturday April 21.  9am start time, and anyone is welcome.   the rest of the season looks like this: May 12th, July 14th, August 11th and 12th, and September 22.  Come join us for any of these, even if you haven't flown an HLG contest before.  We'll guarantee you'll learn more about flying thermals in one day at a contest than in a month of flying by yourself!