Friday - October 15, 2004

I was in Dallas last weekend for the R/C Soaring TNT competition, and as you can see from the picture I have a big smile on my face.  I am the new TNT champion and the trophy comes back up to Chicago for the third year in a row now, Tom Kallevang and Jim McCarthy also of SOAR being previous champions.  The model I was flying was a 73 oz. ICON Lite with all JR digital servos, and the JR 10X transmitter.

Henry Bostick has been coming up to our SOAR Fred Fredrickson Memorial contest for years now and inviting us all down.  TK and Jim McCarthy have been going down to the TNT for about the same amount of times, telling us the stories of all the good times, and that must have rubbed off on Capn' Jack, Ron Kukral and myself as we all made the trip this year.  The contest is held at Southfork Ranch, that's where much of the TV show Dallas was filmed, JR's ranch. 

This was certainly a cool place for a contest.  Here is a link to a small Photo Gallery.

Capn' Jack and I timed for each other at the Nats this year and that was successful for both of us, we had the opportunity to do the same over the TNT weekend.  On Friday Henry lent me an OLY II so I could fly in the RES contest.  This was actually quite fun, the OLY II was a good flying model for the conditions at hand, and Jack and I got a chance to check out the winches and fields.  I think I placed 8th with that lil'OLY, and managed to place ahead of a bunch of high tech RES models. 

The SLNT club has 3 strong winches on trailers, with retrievers.  The fly an open window of 45 minutes to get a round in, you just go do it as soon as you can get your frequency pin.  Saturday morning was hazy, too much good food and drink, not enough sleep, rainy weather... ugh.  Jack and I drove to the field early in the morning, two large coffee's and a 4 pack of RedBull.  We patiently waited for the weather to clear,  I decided to take a nap in the rental car with my model placed under the car to keep it dry.  Half asleep I hear some guy say "hey that's a sweet ICON dude, can I take it".  I knew it was someone messing with me and I replied to the effect of "you better freekin' run fast".  I woke up to see it was my old friend Bruce Hobbs, he had driven in from Austin to watch us fly.

Finally the weather cleared up and we started to contest.  Soon as the opened I flew, landed and then we did Jack's flight, bang - bang.  It was good to fly and we nailed our flights.  We continued to jump up and fly our tasks as soon as Henry opened the round, we wanted to fly.  I remember the 9 minute round later in the day being difficult, really having to work hard for the last 3 minutes surfing on the other side of a treeline several hundred yards upwind of the landing zone, at about twice the tree height.  Capn' Jack got himself into the same situation on the next flight and out flew me, he lasted about 3 and half minutes over those trees!  That's the kinda stuff that happens when we fly together, we fly the same type of model, much the same style, and see and make rapid decisions with confidence. 

I was not really paying attention to the scores, we were flying rounds back to back very rapidly and generally speaking I knew we were doing OK, just like at Nats, a small mistake here or there but OK.  I was surprized to find out I won on Saturday, that was totally unexpected.  However I was not surprized to see so many SOAR pilots in the top five taking home some wood, we were flying strong:

1) Bacus, Jim  2) McCarthy, Jim  4) Strother, Jack  5) Kallevang, Tom  25) Richmond, Don  28) Kukral, Ron

Henry is an unbelievable host.  He has one of the most awesome BBQ's that I have ever seen.  Not only did we have fun flying, but the evenings were a blast too with extremely good food and drink.

Sunday the weather was even worse, overcast with a very low ceiling, maybe 500 foot.  At least it wasn't raining.  Henry wanted to get at least three rounds and the weather wasn't going to get any better so we went at it at high pace.  I backed off my first launch and still went completely invisible on the zoom.  I pushed forward and my ICON dove out of the clouds about where I expected, pulled back to regain altitude and went invisible again, and repeated this cycle about a half dozen times until the zoom energy was burnt off.  It was bouyant at cloud base, it was just a matter of keeping the model visible for the task time and nailing the landings.  My ICON was a shadow in the mist most of the time.  I think I was several seconds late to every landing on Sunday, I was flying conservatively making sure I got as much as the landing tape I could.  Despite this, Jack was killing me on the tape just jamming his ICON into the soft turf in a rude fashion that seems abusive to the model but the ICON is strong and can take it, so he does it.  I was keeping an eye on the SLNT guys feeling that they would be out flying strong on their home field today.  I could see that Jay Schultz, Henry, and  Mark "chia skeg" Willams were also really nailing the tape.  In the end it was a very close scoring contest with Sundays results from memory (I will link to official scores when I see them):

1) Schultz, Jay (SLNT),  2) Strother, Jack (SOAR),  3) Bostwick, Henry (SLNT) , 4) Williams, Mark (SLNT), 5) Bacus, Jim (SOAR)

I want to thank all of the SLNT club members for really putting on a fun contest, I will be back next year for sure.

P.S.  I finished up my LSF V win tasks, hoo yah!  8-)  Only two more tasks to complete the journey.