East Lomond turned out to be a good call today as Bishop was stuck in low cloud for quite a while and although it was a little crossed from the right, the hill was working well.

Blue skies when we turned up at 9.30am and 14ms on the hill, it was a day for full ballast or nearly full. As there were only the hardcore 5 present, we flew two rounds with a crow through and still ended up running round quite a bit.

Rounds 1 & 2 were won by Peter with a 42 and a 40, Ewan and Mike both running 44’s in the first round and Mike and George putting in 44’s in round 2.

I knew that sub 40’s were possible after the first couple of rounds but East Lomond is a strange hill and it was rewarding a slightly different low line on the downwind left hand side, once this was worked out Peter put in a 39.09 in round 3 with Ewan 2nd with a 44.27. Round 4 saw Peter do a sizeable cut on base A followed by a huge flick which he never recovered from, Mike made no mistakes though and posted a 40.51 to take the round by 8 seconds.

Ewan hit a nice spot of air in round 5 and flew a very nice flat EM style to post a 40.01, so close to an East Lomond sub 40! This was followed by Peter with a 43 and Mike with a 45. Peter pipped round 6 with a 43 only beating Mike by two tenths, and Ewan flew a solid 45. Having sorted out his pumping, Peter took round 7 with a 38.77 a full 10s quicker than George who was 2nd with a 48. Peter also took round 8 with a 39.59 from George on 45.78.

Mike McCracken took round 9 with a cracking 39.92 from Ewan in 2nd with a 40.95 and Peter took round 10 with an FTD of 37.09, this run was looking really quick until the last turn which bled a lot of speed. This was followed by Ewan with a very solid 41.50 carving some very nice turns to keep the speed in his Pitfall.

So despite is being bloody cold, about 4 deg C with 35mph wind chill it was a great start to the winter league. We were finished around 1.30pm and decamped to the Pillars of Hercules just as the rain came in.

The results:

FTD Peter Gunning 37.09

It turned out pretty close for 2nd but well done Ewan! You had a really nice line sorted out for the last 4 rounds and cutting all of us on base A must have helped ;0) A really good result seeing as Mike was flying pretty well too.

Lets hope for more of the same next month.

Peter