The Kakanui Vintage Combat (longest day) meeting was a lot of fun with a good turn out, flying from 10am continued till 8.30pm. We flew the balloon burst event in the morning and combat after lunch and general fun flying and trimming till we were totally exhausted. By 9.30pm it was too dark to continue the tidy up. The big combat carnage I expected did not eventuate partly due careful flying of the 'vintage' models but the day did leave us with a big mess of streamers and balloons pieces over the field. Flying combat with relatively slow vintage models has its challenges as the old Fox and OS engines we used got hot and finicky with a muffler (muffler laws in New Zealand) and seem really slow compared to a modern OS FP25 or Magnum 25GP . My new VooDoo with its Fox 36X was twitchy and relatively slow (compared to my Magnum 36 on pipe) but had a nice mellow sound by comparison. Everyone seemed to enjoy the balloon burst with the cardboard wall following the series of balloons on sticks , meaning you had to dive down then suddenly climb away before you hit the wall in spectacular fashion. Otto proved his reactions here while I made the worst crash of the day. Special thanks to my wife Alina who prepared a nice lunch and John Carrodus for his support of the event. Hopefully next year we will get even more people along and a few more daring flyers . With a bit of luck we will run a C/L fun scale day in the new year here in Kakanui . Hope you all have a good and safe Christmas