Scoring

It turns out that I got a little bit too excited. I guess the task yesterday was 3 hrs, not 2.5. I finished my task slightly short of the 2.5 hours, and was scored at 2.5 hrs. Hence the 11th place. When they rescored the day, my total distance was divided by 3 hrs, which drastically decreased my overall speed. Basically, it's like I had 0 speed for over half an hour. Instead of 11th, I ended up 21st. It was really my mistake, but it was dissapointing to get so excited about 11th. Really 21st is a good place - my best in a nationals, but not as exciting as 11th.

Oh well, it's all about having fun right? And even if the score wasn't as good as I thought, I had a lot of fun out there, once I got out of the smoke.

For today, we have a similar task as yesterday. A modified assigned task, with a start at Gunsite and then the first turn at China, then as far as you can go until 2.5 (it really is only 2.5 today) hrs have elapsed. The smoke is still really bad to the west, so even though the forecast looks good that direction, I have no plans to go that way. I'll be headed east into the valley that we've been flying over for the past few days. There's a few airports and lots of landable fields. The ridge between the Shasta valley and the Butte Valley is supposed to be working, so I'll try and run along that... Let's hope the smoke clears out soon.