Today DARTS flew a club contest using the unlimited man-on-man format.  The weather began in the 50's but warmed up nicely into the mid 60's.  We had roughly 5 mph breezes that progressed SW to W to NW and even N wind after the contest ended.  It was mostly bright sun with very light clouds only in the morning.  Due to Big10 football the evening before we elected to start at 11 AM.  After 5 rounds of 10 min tasks with 3 inch/point the competitors achieved the following scores (I've put the plane names down but this is from memory and I apologize for errors):

Here are some highlights: 

Based on purely random seeding Ron, Marc and Jerry all flew in the separate flight groups in round 1.  Each of the top 3 handily won their first rounds and never looked back.  They flew together in the top group for the next 4 rounds with very, very consistent scores.  They stayed within a dozen points of each other the whole contest and somehow kept this 1, 2, 3 order through rounds 2-5.

The clouds in the first hour or so of the contest were something that I don't personally remember ever seeing.  A relatively high consistent pattern of small cumulus "puff ball" clouds with extremely regular wisp tails trailing down almost vertically with a slight bend perhaps due to a gentle wind shear.  I left the hi-def camera at home today and I'm kicking myself for it.

I timed for Don Harris in round 2 while he chased lift down wind at about 250 ft up.  Although he caught little puffs of buoyant air he never quite managed to get up and out.  He managed to get close to 6 1/2 minutes with the bulk of it scratching for lift at 100 feet and unfortunately didn't make it back to the field boundaries to score points that round.

I hope the contest went well and a good time was had by all.  On a personal note this was my first time to CD a DARTS contest and enjoyed doing it and would like to thank the competitors for a gentle "break in period."  In any case I know we all got to enjoy some spectacular weather considering it was mid October in Ohio.

Skye Malcom CD

Final scores are list below:

round by round scores are HERE
 

place	name	score	model
1	Ron Mong	5455	Pike Perfect
2	Mart Gellartt	5452	Xplorer
3	Jerry Shape	5451	Pike Perfect (Supra?)
4	Skye Malcom	4279	Eraser
5	David Rice	4068	Mantis
6	Mark Groves	3997	Paragon
7	Don Harris	3384	Dragonfly Strong
8	Gavin Trussell	3247	Supra
9	Greg Bell	1431	Super V
10	Ken Rice	1305	Vista