Ed Rau: After Mark Miller very kindly helped me repair my Fling from my last encounter, I was anxious to get it back into the air. I arrived at the field around 10:30. Rich was only a few minutes behind me and Brendan was only a few minutes behind him. After walking around the field we decided to move our cars down onto Peruque Rd. & set up down there. We set up Brendan's winch & Rich's hi-start. I managed to make a couple of flights and was starting to feel a little more comfortable. Then I had another launch snafu. I really need practice on those. Anyway, I cracked a couple of wing ribs so it's back to the repair bench for me. Mark Miller explained to me what I needed to do & told me when I completed his instructions to let him know & he'd check my repair work & help me put a patch on the wing. While needing to make repairs is a little frustrating, it would be a whole lot worse if not the the support & assistance of Mark. Learning to fly & make repairs has been made a lot easier by all the members who are willing to go out of their way to help. Hopefully, I'll get my repairs done & be back out there next weekend.

Ed

Mark Miller:

My wife has a lot going on at work and she was scheduled to have to be in which means I'm watching Grace. But seeing that today is Brendan's birthday she decided I needed to be at the field to fly with him. What a great wife I have.

i got there last and upon getting out of the car I see that Ed R. is standing around and his Fling is in the car. I take a peek in the trunk and fortunately I see the repairs we made last week were intact but some mud on the nose. Fortunately only some minor rib cracks and loose glue joints. Easy fix for sure.

Brendan is up in the air with his Pike way high. Rich and Ken Moeller were flying their Topasi. Rich was working on LSF Level 1 landings and I know he got at least one. He is becoming more and more comfortable with the Topaz.

I remembered the stabs for the Evolution and decide to try it for a few flights. All is as it always is and very comfortable.

I then decide to work on the Chinese Zoom. I added a half ounce of noseweight last weekend but of course did not have time to try it before the rain came. The weight made quite a difference. I worked on control throws and such and after maybe a dozen fights it started to feel decent. on a few flights I did a full pedal down launch to see what the wing flex look like and all in all it was not as bad as I seem to remember but then there was hardly any wind.

Brendan had many good flights with his Soprano one making 1,000 feet twice and another he topped 2,000 before deciding he was not comfortable. I know I wasn't. I'll let him fill you all in.

A great day again at the field. There was some standing water under the grass but the ground was firm and not a problem. Plenty of dry ground to fly from.

Mark Miller

Brendan Miller:  1800....1900...2000FT! Ok time to come down... SO with the flying yesterday and finally getting the Pike S somewhat close I wanted to fly it a little bit more. I packed up and left a ittle after 9:40 and arrived at the field at some point, I didn't have a watch, I should get one. When I arrived I saw Rich and Ed's cars sitting down at the back of the road that leads to the back, I didn't follow suit just to mushy. We set up a long peruqe rd and had to jump the ditch of standing water left over from the rains. I got the winch set up and put the Pike together. Rich had his Hi start out and Ed took the first throw of the day and got a good launch, his day soon ended with a snafu launch didn't see what happened but broke a couple of ribs, very fixable though. I threw the pike up and worked some very light lift and came down rich threw his Topaz up and did some circles and so did Ken. everyone was flying great and found there own piece of something, with the ground being so wet there wasn't much lift, then things started to dry out and lift started. I really need to start counting my blessings with the Pike, with wrapping the winch line around it yesterday and then today I was flying in some good lift when all of a sudden it was turn one way really hard. I got it down in one piece and noticed my rudder wasn't moving I got up to it and noticed the gap seal on the rudder got stuck on the molded part of the rudder on the fuse, also I didn't have any movement on one side of the wing and the gab seal on the flap was stuck on the wing as well. So that plane was done for the day, I did notice however Ken Moeller going up on the winch and getting some good height out of lift I was in, he said he went up till he almost not see it. During this time my dad showed up, and put his stuff together.

So with the Pike out I put the soprano together and it flew preety darn good I was scrapping for lift and hit a little piece of lift and took it up to 1000ft and back down to 400ft then back up to 1000ft turned into a 30 minute flight, I did another 10 min flight. Then things got interesting I hooked some lift right off of the zoom. The lift was right above me so I took the plane up to where I started to feel uncomfortable, I listened to a vario and it said 1800ft beep beep beep beep 1900ft beep beep beeep beeeeeeeeep 2000ft, ok time to come home. Come down I did I flipped it into speed which just gives me more down and nosed it down, it was interesting trying to figure out how to scrub the speed off. Meanwhile Rich was going for his LSF level one landing tasks he did pretty good with them, I should have been working on my level 2 stuff but just wanted to fly.

Anyway it was a beautiful day, a little humid but was one of those launch once fly all day kind of days.

Brendan