the air was interesting all weekend. SUnday was plagued by some shifty winds, and I use the term wind loosly. Mostly seemed like no wind, only thermals...practicing was fun too, there was some healthy wind in the afternoons when the circles were free. Though I was able to get out there early and get in some practice. Had I flown Sunday like I practiced,, ah well
I, very fortunately, got decent air on both flights. I would have done OK without it in the morning, but I would have been dead on the second flight because I missed the needle/prop selection by a lot (very much like the 2011 Team Trials, where I just couldn't bring myself to screw the needle in sufficiently after the sun came out). Overall I would have much preferred last years 12-15 mph to what we had this time.
I had very poor preparation for this contest and among that was that I didn't have any props in the right pitch range for various reasons. Those marked 3.9 were too much pitch for the morning, and those marked 3.75 were too little for the afternoon. That's because (as I found out ex post facto) they were actually about 4.0-4.1 and 3.5-3.6. The "3.9"s" were WAY too fast/low revs for the morning and the 3.6's would have required at least another 300 RPM for the afternoon flight, putting it up around 10,500, 10600 which is way out of the normal range for my setup.
The sad thing is that this little screwup might have been present since about the 2014 NATs, and would explain why it flew like gangbusters in heavy air (since the baseline is 3.75 and it was really about 3.6) but got a little soft in light air.
No one can expect to compete at this level without proper preparation and there is only one person to blame for that. I was very fortunate to finish 3rd, possibly because Howard was competing and was also *running the contest* and also had reduced prep time. I could easily have been 10th - the competition at these big contest is just too tight and the competitors just too good to not give a full effort.
Brett