At long last the clouds cleared and the much delayed competition was finally on. We certainly couldn't have picked a better meet director than "Our Bob"! His schoolboy enthusiasm, E-Mail propelled persuasiveness, and his mastery of math, produced a format that brought back the excitement of being "picked" from the crowd. " No him! the one with the bushy eyebrows. I'll take him" , and also the deep mystery of the "longest shortest" flights. Of course the winds had to be south east. That, and the published lapse rates on the truck windows, conspired to have the entire herd chasing over every launch on the mountains except the Brotherhood and the Back 'o' the Rack. Naturally another weird coincidence brought out a two wheel drive TV team desperate to get shots for their feature other than a scraggly gang kicking dust off the launches. Just when agreement seemed to have been reached, and the "Deaster" had been sprayed with gravel from head to foot, we were in the middle of unloading the gliders at the Alternator when the "Chocolateer" suddenly announced he wouldn't take the southeaster! Quick as a flash our team leader Hammered us into tying all the gliders back up on the racks, and to shouts of "Snookered again" we roared back to the E.

     Stratagem! stratagem!! stratagem!!! As the seldom popular Rich Pfeiffer says in his book: "To win: read the rules, and psyche out the competition". Top marks to the Hammer on that one, because the E, which was by now almost launchable, offered far more achievable turnpoints, even on a sled ride, than the Alternator, and his team was back to full strength. However the "lapse raters" still seemed to have the upper hand and the bushy eyebrowed wind dummy was soon lost to view in the lower folds of the Holy Hills smacking the manzanita with his wing tips with only one turnpoint in the bag. According to Ines, our leader, after threatening the rest of the team with dire consequences if they didn't get the house thermal at once after take off, himself did a fine representation of a falling sledge hammer almost all the way down to the Postage Stamp. But victory was rescued from the jaws of disaster, the wind dummy snagged a lifesaver off the Roadcut and went on to make ten points. The Hammer came back to wear a groove in the air between the Thermal Factory and the Peak. Kip held up the average, and the Chocolateer made a shorter shortest flight.

     At Parma the long-suffering Janet, who had waited hours for the sight of a single glider was suddenly besieged with accounts of "how I saved it", then came the scoring! After the root mean square of the median highest common denominator of the integral of the turnpoint accumulators had been put through the super computer the yellow team was declared the distance winner to loud, (if disbelieving) cheers. And Rolan was aghast to discover that he had won his team the longest shortest award with one of the shorter flights of his career. Tony the Tiger was longest in the air and landed way long (almost up by Mountain Drive!). He had made so many turnpoints and just knew he had to be a winner. Read the rules Tony you're way to good for this competition. Get off to Chelan why don't you!