Houston, 2004

This site was last updated on February 15, 2008.

This year's edition of the Houston World Cup F2D contest was held over the weekend of April 30 though May 2, 2004. There were actually 2 contests: 1/2A and F2D. Pat Willcox is the organizer and CD. Here's his report.

Mack Henry and David Owen flew in from Nashville, Tennessee. Leonardo Silva drove up from Tuxpan, Mexico. Another of the Mexican team, Fred Quezada, flew in from Mexico City. My son is also at the house for at short while longer before moving to his house in Dallas. Mike spent about a week cleaning and painting my shop so it was real pleasant for hanging out with all these houseguests.

Friday start time got going about 2pm. Full double elimination. Nice weather conditions. All fliers were running Cyclons. Electric starters made for max flying with minimum time spent on flipping engines. Plenty of good combat with a fair amount of kills and mid airs about every fourth match. Eleven fliers entered with winners Roy Krupa, Andy Mears, and Steve Brisbay. We finished about 6:30 pm. My wife had some delicious brisket for guests and that sure went well with favorite refreshments. I made it a fairly short evening due the big day ahead with an early start. Not sure about the houseguests, but I think I heard something about a 2 or 3am bedtime!!

Saturday morning I got up early to check weather and what a bummer. Forecast is 70% chance of heavy thunderstorms with Sunday looking pretty good. I live about 50 miles north of the field and sometimes this makes a big difference in the weather, so I was hoping maybe there was a chance to get in a couple rounds. At our 9am pilots' meeting (14 entries), we initially decided to wait till 1pm to start, hoping for better weather. So off to the favorite fast food, Whataburger. We have some food and observe the lighting, thunder and rain.

Bill Lee, who remained at the flying site in his warm and toasty RV, called me on the cell phone and says the ditches are all full and the flying circles are now islands. We are talking serious heavy rain, which continued all day into early evening. Cancel for the day with plans for Sunday and better conditions. Saturday afternoon, Allen DeVeuve and Tom Siegler joined us at the house and we went to local soccer field and got in a quite a few matches before dark. We ordered pizza at the house with plenty of stories that were embellished in proportion to intake of favorite beverages.

Sunday arrival at the field, the weather is good but the water is deep with the park being flooded. We now have a nice elevated pavilion and our flying two circles are elevated with cement center circles. We decided to replace triple elim with double elim and fly only one circle, as we were limited on available dry area to have a pit area. I was able to place 4" thick, 12" square cement blocks so we could walk across the water to flying circle and keep our feet dry.

John Hess did Center circle with his brother Chris doing Chief judge/filling in score sheets. Mack Henry and I did the timing and the three of us did cut calling. The black and orange plastic streamers with cotton 20+ pound test string worked great. If I must say so myself, we did a pretty good job of calling cuts for a couple of old guys helping Chris. Bill Lee set up under the pavilion with a couple laptops and he and Sheila Cranfill did the matrix and tabulation. Lunch was burgers enjoyed in scenic view of the flood waters flow.

This contest was a warm up for World Champs to sort out a few issues;

The nice "Howard Rush" designed and built pull-test device worked perfect and is a nice, user-friendly way of handling this labor-intensive chore and will be used at the W/C.
The matrix computer program worked flawlessly and made for quick posting and redraws to keep the contest on a fast pace.
I only did a small test of "Sisal" string streamers to make sure they work OK and, yes, that will be the product used at W/C.
Over all, I was real pleased with the day's out come in the contest management side and I think our team will be able to do a respectable job at W/C.

About 32 matches with reflys. Winners were Mike Willcox, Richard Stubblefield and Leonardo Silva. One flyaway went up high and came back down in the flying circle. No injuries for the weekend and only a couple of glitches with lost tempers. Got my reports in the mail and that wraps up another fun "happening". Till next time... Pat Willcox