As I'm writing this, I'm still at our house waiting for the rain to stop along with Mark.

The flying order for today’s second round of the semi finals has Ian up 6th in the running order with Mark and myself a little later in the morning.

Today's plan was for Ian to head to the contest site where the first 7 pilots are allowed to practice before the event starts for the day and for Mark and myself to get a quick warm up flight in at the practice field which does not open until 8am.

But at this time, it’s looking very wet until late morning so it’s going to be a lot of sitting around and clock watching for now.

Back to yesterday- the first round of the semi finals. It was a very early start with Steve being 4th in the running order so we headed for the contest site so that Steve could get a warmup flight in. When we arrived, we were faced with low cloud and mist. Steve got his flight in and was happy. When it was his turn to fly the sun was starting to appear from the right-hand end of the site which made visibility slightly difficult but the reflection from the low-lying mist in front of us was off putting. Steve did a good job though and scored 213.35 out of 270 in this more complex semi finals program placing him 6th in the round.

We headed back to the practice field so that Mark and Ian could get a few flights in and worked on some aspects that were slightly under par.

Ian was next to fly and did a great job but was getting blown out by the cross wind that was present by now. Ian scored 185.75. Ian finished the round 17th for the day.

Mark out in one of the best rounds I have seen him do all week with no major mistakes. We were however slightly disappointed with his score of 204 thinking that it would have been slightly higher. This put Mark into 10th for the round.

F3C rules are complex but basically, we drop our lowest preliminary round and then re-normalise (add 3 rounds together and divide by 3) to give us a single round score. We fly 2 semi finals and we then have 3 scores. Dropping the lowest will give us the results of the semi finals with the top 14 pilots going into tomorrow’s finals.

The results before so far are Steve 5th, Mark 9th and Ian 17th. This is not a totally clear picture as the order is moving about with some pilots being less confident in the semi finals program than others, but the team is doing well laying in joint 3rd with France

Steve Roberts