2005 Tiger XC Results

Congratulations to Thomas McCune for winning the first ever Tiger XC

The forecast didn't look promising for the entire weekend but we got one nice day on Saturday. We arrived on Friday evening just in time for an XC seminar/GPS instruction/strategy seminar put on by Bob Rinker (meet director). It was great to see a room full of competitiors and free fliers eager to prepare themselves for the upcoming XC tasks. This is the first ever XC competition at Tiger and there was a lot of anticipation.

A relatively short task was called on Saturday after a great catered BBQ lunch on launch (which I have never seen at a competition before). The 8 mile task was complex (with 5 turnpoints) and challenging nonetheless due to the overcast skies but a large 2.5 hour launch window opened up the opportunity to hav ea couple attempts for those that launched early and sank out.

I wasn't too encouraged by the overcast skies to launch so I held back while the first five or so launched and scratched around for quite some time and launched just after Brett and a couple others finally scratched their way above launch. There seemed to only be one source of lift right at launch so that is where we ended up returning to after getting each of the first two turnpoints (which were no more than 2 miles from launch). Brett ended up getting the third turnpoint which was launch but I got back too low to get it and we then scratched our way down to the LZ.

Thom McCune (local XC distance record holder) showed us the lesson to take advantage of all opportunites presented to you during a competition and had his second launch ten minutes before the launch window closed into somewhat sunny skies and had a great time making his way through the entire course in about 45 minutes from when he launched.

We had a single start time of 2PM so Thom's flight ended up looking like a 2h33m flight. This would be the only task of the meet as we were hit with hard rains the next morning.

All-in-all, it was a great fun weekend thanks to Bob organizing the event and to all those that helped out. It was great to see a first time event put so much emphasis on instructing novice competitors, requiring GPSs and using the formal scoring system and GPS verification. It is a great learning process for all and I hope to see this become and annual event.

Mark

Scores:

Penalties

Tasks:
- Single start time
- A remote start cylinder to minimize traffic
- Would like to set triangles, conditions permitting, to be spectator friendly and
minimize retrieves.
- GPS required (there will be seminars on how to use)

Scoring:
- using CompeGPS
- Mark & Donna Dowsett doing the scoring