2008 Thunder in The Desert – Alamogordo – NAR Regional

Here’s the standings/results from last weekend (June 21-22) NAR competition down at White Sands. From Colorado, Russ Anthony’s family represented CRASH and Becky and I went down representing NCR. Besides the folks listed below from FLARE and SMRA in NM, there was actually another 5 rocketeers registered, but for some reason or another elected not to fly (they spent time setting up and running the range for the rest of us).

The Alamogordo facility is great! They have permanant shed roof pavilions with tables to work on your rockets out of the sun. There were two launch systems setup, so while we were prepping contest rockets, the Alamogordo HP group was launching the bigger stuff. There was no waiting to fly.

The thermals were trecherous. I had an eggloft altitude (E15-7) that hit 760M high, but after deployment, was fast dissapearing to the NE and Becky and I chased it in our Jeep down the highway. We stopped along the road heading out of Alamogordo about 5 miles away to take a look, and there it was descending right on top of us. Unfortunately, the egg was not attached to the rest of the rocket. I flew it again, this time with an Estes E9-6 and a smaller chute with a large spill hole, and hit 690 Meters with a safe recovery and won that event. Launching an egg with an E-motors proved to be very challenging, as there were a lot of seperations, shredding and of, course dusty omelets. I learned a lot!

Russ Anthony’s D-Helicopter duration caught a magnificant thermal and was recovered with a time of 3:68 minutes. Remarkable. The rest of us were about a minute. I was able to pull out a win in three events and Russ won the other two. I have to give him a lot of the credit as he was showing me all the ‘modern’ tricks when I first got back into this last November.

I used my laptop and NAR’s Contest Manager software to log the data (as practice for working at NARAM) so I’m able to give you the results the day after:

White Sands Summer Regional Meet Champions
http://telerover.com/rockets/NCR/WhiteSandsRegional_June21_Champ.pdf

Place__Contestant____________NAR#__Sec___Total Points

A Division
1 Anthony-Ceres, Ryan________82918__482___1638
2 Miller, Saywer______________85195__488___1518
3 Anthony-Ceres, Daniel_______82917__482___948
4 Kovar, Lynsey______________86810__577___144

C Division
1 Konshak, Michael____________896____565___1956 (Overall Champ)
2 Anthony, Russell_____________81741__482___1242
3 Kovar, David________________86611__577___942
4 Basler, James J._____________79911__577___543
5 Basler, James W.____________36808__577___468
6 Berpka, Jon________________84874__488___27

Sections
1 CRASH____________________________482__3828
2 FLARE_____________________________577__2097
3 NCR______________________________565__1956
4 SMRA_____________________________488__1545

White Sands Summer Regional Standings (Details of each event)
http://telerover.com/rockets/NCR/WhiteSandsRegional_June21_Results.pdf