Day7
Today we had fly offs for the pre contest. I must say it is really amazing to watch people do short tows at 9:15 in the morning for a 15minute round. The confidence of those pilots must have been insane, but in the end they were not able to pull their full time out… The pilot who won the pre contest was the only one to make all three times (Lionel of France). Joe took second with two minutes dropped, and Kolb took third with somewhere around 3.5minutes dropped.
Pilots were handed out their trophies which were really cool – cast metal animals common to South Africa, the cheetah, a giraffe couple, and a zebra. Then the real fun began, the organizers hired the South African Acrobatic pilot Glen ____ who flew his Redbull extra 300s and gave what had to have been the most amazing performance I have ever seen. The regulations such as minimum height are not as well enforced here, so naturally the pilot decided to do some REALLY REALLY REALLY low passes. Try 6 feet off of the ground at full speed, or 15 feet off of the ground inverted. As if that wasn’t cool enough by itself, we then had a helicopter come and do some low passes and land at the field and what not. After watching Glen though – that was pretty boring. After the private airshow, the opening ceremonies commenced and were followed by a South African xylophone band, which was also quite stunning. All in all the day7 was the best one so far. So many good memories that it is hard to think that my trip to Cape Town will hold a candle to it.