Having posted a warning that the comp may have to cancelled due to the high winds forecast, it was with some relief that I watched the forecast get better as the weekend drew near. The high winds came a day early on the Saturday, leaving the Sunday a lovely day, but the wind stayed at about 10/12mph for much of the duration of the contest.
We had 12 entries, but this was reduced to 11, due to Ray Gadennes wife being taken ill suddenly. Ray has always been a stalwart of the comps run at this site, so he was missed on the day, hopefully all will be well at home. I should like to mention, as some people have raised the fact that Peter Mitchell, who was a prime mover in draughting the rules that we now use at Bartletts, has had much the same problem, in that Carol his wife has developed a serious health condition, that precludes him from flying, anymore this year.
As most of the models had been checked out previously & had a sticker to verify their weight/watts allowance, the comp got under way at 10.45 pm. Not quite true , in that there was a major problem with Paul Wainwright’s 2 metre model catching fire in the pit area, that led to the start being held back until this was sorted. Bearing in mind that there were few people around the pit area, as all were flying or timing, as there were only 2 slots per round.
Dereck Collings was very pleased with his acquisition of a 12V battery from the local tip, to charge his batteries, that he forgot to bring his tailplanes for his model & drove home again to get them!!!!
The cause of the fire was that the LiPo had been put on charge, in a NiCad setting, pushing some 5 amps through a 2200 LiPo!!!!!!!!!!!!  The model was very badly damaged, as was most of the power train.

Drama over we got under way using a 22 second power run as agreed at the briefing. This gave a winning time of just over 9 minutes, with most slots that followed, also achieving a flyer over the 9 minutes. Only Slot1 of Rounds 5&6, never got past 6 minutes max.

Landings also caught a lot of flyers out with the big hand reaching out to pull the model down, short of the spots.

Brian had to power up, or land out with possible damage to the model, lost out to a zero score in Round 6.

So to the results :-

1st Alan Twine 5908,
2nd Tony Merritt 5653,
3rd Paul Wainwright 5569,
4th Keith Fisher 5239,
5th Peter Sainsbury 5074,
6th Brian Austin 4993,
7th Robin Sleight 4245,
8th Ray Elwell  4074,
9th Rod Potts 3991,
10th D Collings 3977
11th G Read 1719.