Updates from the F5J WC In Bulgaria

[Alex Maxfield]

Hi All, and greetings from Dupnitsa in Bulgaria where we will be staying for this week. The flying field here sits in a bowl, surrounded by mountains, beautifully picturesque, and at this time of the year usually very hot.

First of all, a MASSIVE thank you to everyone who took part on the raffle organised by Neil Jones. The cost of getting our team (myself, Steve and Simon Haley, and Rick Lloyd as Team Manager) out here is significant and your contributions (along with those from the BARCS and the BMFA) will go a long way to help cover the major costs of our trip. We also appreciate all the support from everyone over the social media channels - your well wishing is much appreciated. Also appreciated is the on-field help from Graham Wicks and Steve Knowles.

I will try to provide a regular update to our progress, for those of you on Facebook, the F5J UK site will get regular updates also.

We arrived last Thursday night and went straight into the IKAR cup which is a 2 day F5J competition before the World Championships, and gave us a chance to re-familiarise ourselves with the field and the "micro-climate" weather. There was around 125 entries, many of the people who planned to fly the WCs were there - many of the "great" soaring names I'd heard about all present and correct. Conditions were good generally, and challenging from time to time, with light and variable thermal lift and massive sink. Launch heights varied from 10 metres to 250 metres - at our best we made quite a few around the 40 metre mark which still feels a little bit alien for us - it's tough flying 9 minutes 58 seconds and a 50 point landing bonus with a 40m launch height and getting "only" a 970.

We flew our regular "mode", looking for thermal feeds and circling birds, but it didn't work well for us. Lift was in many places across the field in small bubbles and most pilots flew in a pack using other models as the major lift indicator. We learned quite a bit on how not to fly on this field. Overall results from our side were a bit below par and we were a bit disappointed, but we persevered.

The fly-off of the IKAR cup was an amazing spectacle to watch with most pilots flying at 5 metres high across the field looking for lift before launching finally to around 25 metres, flying 14 mins and 59 seconds and getting 50 landing points. 14 pilots flew the fly-off and their qualifying scores before fly-off were separated by around 100 points over the 14 pilots - so very close.

 

The WCs started today with around 85 entries for seniors and 30 for juniors.  The weather was hot and the wind variable. Wind strength went from flat calm at 8am to gusting 30+ mph just after mid-day. Due to the wind speeds, thermal activity was scarce and very fast moving - very few people went down wind of the launch point. Strangely the sinky air seemed to stay around for longer. Flying 4 minutes from a 200m launch was the norm. Many of the competition continued to fly lightweight models - launching to 200m + upwind and slowly drifting back to the landing spot, which seemed a good strategy.

There is just about every make and model of commercial available F5J model flying here, also one "home brew" that I counted flown by a pilot from the US. The previous IKAR cup had a Plus X, a Prestige and an Eternity in the top 3. There were many pilots flying Explorer Q4s also.

We flew 3 rounds of the seniors today (and later watched 3 rounds of the juniors). During the last round, Simon, Steve and I were flying our Prestiges full ballasted at around 2.7kg and were still not heavy enough. Our motors and flight batteries worked overtime to haul such heavy airframes up to 200m launch height and 400m upwind.

So far Simon Haley has the best result from team GBR at 14th with both Steve and I nursing a poor round, We have 14 rounds in total to fly before the weekend so many things could change. We will do our best for all of you supporting us.

 

 

 

[ThermalBoy]

Hang in there guys. Its a marathon not a sprint. A lot can happen over the coming days especially so with the weather conditions you are having to deal with. Go for it.

Colin

[Alex Maxfield]

Hi All,

Yesterday was the last day of the qualifying rounds and unfortunately no one from Team GBR made the flyoff. Simon Haley was our best placed pilot and was in close contention for a fly off place until the last flight. Steve Haley and I were quite a bit further down the leader board.

Today we will watch the final 2 rounds of the fly offs for Juniors and Seniors which will be a closely fought end to this competition. Too soon the say who will win; the French pilots look to be on course for a good result but anything can happen with the remaining 2 flights. I will post a final set of results after today with news on the winners and what they were flying.

The weather today will go from being flat calm to windy as it has done on most days. The first slots will have people flying "FAI Light" models at just over 1000g in weight in very light lift conditions launching at 15 metres, and may end up with gliders ballasted up to 3000g launching to 250 metres.

Thanks again for all the support from our friends back at base - it really helps.

[mikef]

I couldn't find any reference to the Team on the BMFA website - similar to F3K - see here:- 

https://www.barcs.co.uk/forums/topic/12353-team-gbr-2023-f3k-world-championships/page/8/#comment-196538