Arrived at the mines at 07:45 straight into practice until 09:00, at 09:00 round one starts, each competitor flies one flight per round, conditions early were very good with negligible drift, early in the round Ivan Treger (Slovakia) set a 27:37 flight, the UK team started off with Hans who got a 22:22 flight in quite large circles including 4 bounces of the walls, I was next scoring a dismal 9:41, I screwed up big time missing a steer and hit the wall about 140′ up, sliding all the way down to ground level, Tony flew last and got a reasonable 23 min flight with no steers needed.
Round 2 began at 13:00 by then there was some drift but nothing like the previous 4 days as today there were very few visitors and all fliers confined to the pits at one end, USA fliers had been setting some high times with Emily Gutette at 28:31 and Kang Lee a 25:21, Ivan Treger hit back with 24:54, this put him in the lead at the end of day one, for the UK team Tony got a 20:26 and Hans 21:47 putting him in 8th overall, I made a mistake in using the same motor as the previous round as it was well past its best and landed me at 13Min and 500 turns left wound on the motor, rubber being an organic material ages and suffers from abuse, winding to 1300 turns take it to and beyond limits and a rubber motor may last 3 to 4 flights max before it either breaks on winding or is thrown away, my target was 22mins but dead rubber put and end to that.
Anyway two more days of competition to go and everything can change as the winner is the two longest flights (added together) over the three days of competition, I am told that the winner is most often decided by go for broke flights on the last two rounds.
Terry Adams, Team GBR – F1D
