AUDI
Soaring Competition 2017
7–15 January 2017 BY ROSS GADDES
Flying up the Coromandel Peninsula prior to landing back at Thames (just for fun with Maurie in the PW5)
On Sunday 15 January 2017 we packed up and finalised our nine day annual club event (normally called the Drury Comps).
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n July last year Graham Player and I decided that we would organise another Drury Competition in early January 2017. This allowed us plenty of time to prepare. The Drury Comps have been held at Drury on and off for several decades. They have always been aimed at promoting cross country and competition within our local club membership, but had died a little up until January 2011 when we revived the event. Initially I tried to get a few outside the club interested in visiting Drury by convincing them they needed to sample yet another crosscountry site. I don’t think Drury had ever been considered as such (by other clubs) being so near to Auckland and the two coasts. The 2011 contest (etched firmly in the memory of those that attended) with nine continuous days of not just good, but excellent, soaring weather provided fantastic soaring and racing. With many days having light or favouring easterly winds we got to fly down the west side of Hamilton and as far as Taupo, regularly racing over 350 km and there was only one land-out during the entire event. This encouraged us to apply for and run the Club Class Nationals in 2015. These also proved very successful but last year we had a break as many were primed up to support the Multi-Class Nationals being held in Taupo 2016. This year I was quite happy to help host a low-key event so I wasn’t panicking about organising too much. After attending the disastrous South Island Regionals
(weather wise) I was very impressed by the prize giving presentation, given by Justin Wills, who was talking about the different and successful approaches to some competitions being held in the UK. In particular, the Enterprise idea seemed to fit our objectives for our traditional club event. After discussing it with Graham Player (Contest Director) we made a decision to run with this format. It’s fair to say I really only had the basic idea on how the format operates and needed to spend some time on calls with Justin Wills. The key idea (to me at least) is that it’s the not just the competition but about providing lots of fun – in the air and on the ground – for the competitors and the supporters. Justin has attended a huge number of UK Enterprise comps and has brought the idea to Omarama as well. My plan was to use the ideas loosely and not get too excited about exactly emulating the concept, which is actually very simple. The idea is to encompass a huge range of ability and glider types so that everyone can fly to their own level or better and hopefully provide challenges in a supportive environment. All competitions do this to some extent but the enterprise format focusses on getting the most soaring from the day. With literally days to run, we were still pretty laid back about the event. It was about then that Simon Gault fired a hand grenade into the room which forced us to quickly get our act together. He approached Audi NZ who were quite excited about helping out and offered up a great 1st Prize – the use of a brand February–April 2017
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