This morning I staggered out the hotel into the darkness to be greeted by stars and no wind. Finally we would be able to fly.

We headed into town and showed up to the first official practice flight briefing. David Levin, the Championship Director, set a simple task of a Fly In and a Fly On. The Fly In meant we had to find our own launch site and fly to a target they had set in a field. The Fly On meant we had to declare an intersection of our own choice and fly to that.

The Aussie team headed out to the north of Battle Creek to try and find a decent launch site amongst all the woodland. While we were on the side of the road working out who’s farm we would as permission to launch from, Steve, the Land Owner Relation officer for the event pulled up and asked if we wanted to fly from the property we were parked out. It just happened to be his mum’s place and he led us into the back of their property to a perfect launch site.

We quickly inflated the balloons (the first time Matt had seen his new balloon) and I headed off first. It was the first time I had flown in Battle Creek and it was pretty exciting to get up and see the area from the air.

We were to the North West of the target and were reliant on the ground winds to get us over to the target. When I got into the air I could see a line of the Team USA balloons coming in from the North in the higher winds. Matt, Pete and I flew in from the side and placed ourselves in the middle of the US queue.

I ended up flying right next to Nick Donner from the US for the rest of the flight. We both approached the first target next to each other. It was a great feeling to actually get to the target on my first practice flight in the new area. Unfortunately I did a pretty week throw of the marker and it landed about 7m from the centre of the cross. It should have been closer, but I now realise I have a tendency to under throw. Matt absolutely nailed the first cross, throwing onto the centre square of the target (so well under a metre).

Photo pinched from Brad Temeyer via Facebook

We then headed down to a highly wooded intersection for our Fly On. I ended up coming in a bit high and had to rely on a clinometer drop from a couple of hundred feet at speed. Once again the trust clino served me well and the marked landed about 7m from the intersection.

After about 50 minutes I saw I was headed towards a long line of woods. As I was I approaching the woods, I flew over a field that had a friendly farmer waving in it and I decided that I should call it quits and landed in the field.

I have to say, we have met a lot of really friendly and helpful locals. This farm was very much one of them. He was a little concerned we might bog our van in the field because it was slippery and hilly. So as we were leaving he appeared with his tractor just in case we got bogged. We didn’t, but it was a kind gesture all the same.

At lunch time the Aussie Team all sat down and had a team meeting. It was a chance for us to all discuss and agree on how we would work together on the ground pre flight and how we would communicate in the air. It was a really productive session and I think that it really showed that the whole team works really well together. Hopefully that will bring us all up the field during the next week.

The day was ended with the balloonpong.com party at one of the local bars. The turn out was fantastic and it was great way to catch up with all the people we had not seen for years (but spend a lot of time Facebooking).

The weather looks like it is going to be good for another practice flight in the morning. We have the Master Briefing in the afternoon. That is then followed by the opening ceremony. We don’t know what the ceremony will entail but they are going to be live streaming it from 7pm Eastern US time…

http://www.zoovision.com/worldballoonchampionship/

Oh BTW, please ignore any typos, spelling and grammar in this blog. I am always writing it in bed when I am trashed and about to go to sleep… so I really can’t be bothered proof reading it. I just want to sleep… good night.

We just had another day of not flying. The weather set in overnight and wrote off any hopes of ballooning.

There was a vague hope of flying this morning, so we met up with Team USA just before 6am but the pre-frontal winds picked up and it was game over. By lunchtime it was pissing with rain and it ended up being another day of cruising the shopping malls, buying bits and pieces.

The front moved through pretty quickly but has left us with some heavy wind and rain. As I am typing this (before crashing for the night) the radar is showing scattered light showers. It should clear by morning, so the only question should be if the wind will drop.

Current radar

We did have to register for the event this afternoon. That involved standing in a queue of pilots for 45 minutes (flashbacks of Disneyland) and then the spend 5 minutes showing all your paper work to prove you are who you say you are, that you are a pilot and that your balloon is legitimate. There is always a few nerve-racking moments in that queue where your gut tells you that you have forgotten some piece of paperwork, even though you know you have checked numerous times. Fortunately it was all in order and now we can compete.

It hasn’t been such clear sailing for the Japanese Team. They have an issue that their ballooning federation is not recognized by the Japanese aviation authority, hence it is not recognized by the rest of the World. The US FAA decided a couple of weeks ago that the Japanese pilots did not have legitimate licences and their balloons were not certified to fly in the US.

Fortunately Team USA found a solution, where they bought all of the Japanese pilot’s balloons (for a couple of dollars) so they could get them certified and registered as US aircraft. Then they got the Japanese pilots to get their US student licences which allows them to fly solo in an US aircraft. So the FAA were inspecting their balloons this morning and when I last saw them this afternoon, the US registration certificates were starting to be issued.

Kath’s Aunt Liz and Uncle John came down from Canada today to join us for a couple of days. Kath has not seen them for about 20 years. So it was nice to catch up with them and have dinner. We found another nice restaurant in the center of town. Once again we got beaten by the massive size of the US servicing. Sean and I shared a massive Taco pizza that could have fed the entire table. Short of turning this into a food blog, here is my daily food photo.

Token Food Photo – Taco Pizza

So hopefully we will get a flight in the morning. It is the first official practice flight, so we have to meet at 6am for a practice briefing. This will give the officials a chance to practice running some tasks and a chance for the pilots to practice flying some.

Well that was a big day. After a sleepless night of thinking about all the things that I needed to get done, Rob and I jumped in my temporary hire car and headed over to Detroit (about 1.5 hours from Battle Creek). First stop was to pick up Sean and Deano, who flew in last night, from their airport hotel.

With the team together, we drove down the road to the car hire depot, dreading having to deal with the van issue (covered in my previous post). When we got to the hire place, we were pleasantly surprised to have a very helpful girl that told us they were not allowed to remove the seats from the van, but she showed us how too should we want to do it once we were out of sight. The van is massive, it is normally a 15 seater but after removing 2 rows of seats we are able to fit the balloon and still have room for 8 people.

The Big White Whale… needs some pimping

So with the van picked up we headed further down the road to the freight company to pick up the balloon. We were greater by a lovely, friendly girl (Pam) who kindly and sweetly informed us that the balloon had not cleared customs yet and could take between 24-48 hours! On saying that, I think she must have been completely surprised by the look of horror on our faces. She promptly told us to give her some time and she would see if she could convince them to do it faster. So we headed off to do some shopping in Super Kmart and waited for her call. Pam rang us back and told us that it was going to be done in 3 hours, so we decided to hang out in the back streets of Detroit and wait.

During this time, we embarked on removing the back 2 rows of seats from the van. After a couple of hours running around to get the right tools to properly set up the back of the van, we got a call to say that the balloon had cleared customs. The wait ended up being a blessing in disguise because we would not have been able to get the balloon into the van without those couple of hours of rearranging things in it.

Sean and Deano being proud of getting a square peg into a not so square hole

Once the balloon was picked up we headed back to Battle Creek and unpacked the balloon so we could get the tanks out to get filled. By the time we had done this and got down to the gas depot it was 6pm. We then found that the gas depot shut at 5pm. Personally I think it is crazy that 3 days before the Worlds begin, when people are arriving in town with empty tanks or doing practice flights, that you cannot refuel after 5pm. Anyway, we made some calls and found out there was a hardware store across town that sold propane. Luckily they were open until 7pm, but unfortunately they were pretty expensive (by US standards but were about on par with what we pay back home).

Exhausted but satisfied that everything was organised (apart from a few odds and ends), we found a really nice Sushi restaurant and were suitably impressed with how good the food and service was. Always good to find a decent eating spot early on.

Certainly did not expect to get good Japanese in Battle Creek… very happy team

We are hoping get a flight in in the morning. They are forecasting thunderstorms and rain, but hopefully we will be able to squeeze something in. We are meeting up with some of the American team (so I can bludge a fan off them). Matt ran out of time to get fuel, so he is going to come for a flight with me so we can both get our bearings.

So with the logistics behind us, we can now focus on the flying.

Fingers crossed for good weather tomorrow.

We are currently sitting on our flight, cruising at 30,000 feet, on our way to Battle Creek (via Detroit).

We just had 3 days at Disneyland in LA to “wind down” from work before kicking into ballooning mode. The weather was really hot, between 35-38 degrees celcius each day. We had a great time but after 3 days we were pretty much ready to move on.

I have to say that having WiFi on a flight is very handy. It means I can spend the 4 hour flight sorting out logistics rather than just thinking about them.

The logistics pain has already begun. As I was about to board the plane, I called the car rental company would have our van ready to pick up tomorrow. I had arranged (about a month ago) to get a 15 seat van and they said they would remove the 2 rows of seats so we can fit the balloon in. I had been assured by the District Manager that this would be done. When I asked them just now, they said they could not legally remove the seats and the District Manager that had told me they could was no longer with the company. Oh Joy!

So tomorrow morning, when we pick up the van, Sean and I are going to have to see if we are going to be able to remove them ourselves and if not, we might have to scramble around Detroit to find a pickup to hire.

Tomorrow is also the day to pick up the balloon, helium, gas, fire extinguisher and a fan. So it is going to be a busy day.

We are sitting at The Qantas Club at Sydney Airport and our adventure is about to begin. Unfortunately our flight has been delayed by an hour because of the 100kmh wind gusts. We have been enjoying the view of 737s and 747s aborting their landings and pulling up as they get baffled by the cross winds.

We are stopping off in LA for 4 days of wind down at Disneyland. I don’t actually feel like I need to wind down because I am actually feeling very relaxed already. However I am sure that I will feel different after 14 hours of flying.

Our last view of Sydney

It has been a while since I have posted, but it is time to resurrect the blog because in 6 days we are heading over to the US to compete at the World Hot Air Balloon Championships.

The Worlds are being held at Battle Creek in Michigan (the home of Kelloggs). I am one of the 3 Australian heading over to take on the rest of the world. The other 2 pilots are Matt Scaife and Peter Wright. Both pilots are really good friends of ours and we all work really well together on the ground and in the air.

I haven’t done a huge amount of flying leading up to the event, but my main preparation at the moment is to make sure I don’t burn myself out during the next 4 days of work. We are going to be taking a few days off in LA to wind down at Disneyland before heading over to Michigan. I have found in the past that it is really important to have a couple of days buffer before diving straight into flying. It allows for any jet lag and work lag to get out of the system.

This year we have set up the Australian Balloon Team Facebook page which will allow us to keep all of our friends and family up to date with our antics. I plan to also keep this blog up to date with more detail thoughts about the event and my performance. When we were at the worlds in Japan in 2006 I found that blogging helped me think about each flight and analyze what I did right and wrong.

The balloon is all packed up and ready to be stuck on a plane and freighted to Detroit.

Sean Kavanagh, who is coming across as part of the team (along with Kath, James and Mum and Dad), has kindly lend me (again) his EX65 racer balloon. I have spent more time flying this balloon in the last couple of year than I have my own, so I can’t wait to get back into it in a week’s time and hit the skies above Michigan.

So the last things to do now are pack our clothes and all the computer and electronic equipment that we will be taking with our personal luggage.

I have to admit that I went into the Canowindra Challenge completely unprepared. I had only flown 4 times in the previous 12 months and with the Worlds looming on the horizon, the pressure to get some good flying in was starting to wear on me.

Not happy

David Levin, who will be directing the World Championships in August, had kindly agreed to come out to Australia from the US to run this year’s competition. It was going to be great practise for both of us leading up to the Worlds. Unfortunately a few pilots had to pull out at the last minute, so we ended up only having 7 pilots competing. This didn’t seem to faze anyone and everyone took it as seriously as they would a Nationals. It was game on!

When you only have 7 pilots competing in a competition using the AXMER rule book, the scores for a task can be brutal. Basically if you didn’t get in the top 3 results (i.e. above the median pilot) for a task you would really suffer. There were many glum faces during the event by pilots (including myself on occasions) when they realise they only picked up 400 points for a 14 metre drop.

This brutal scoring certainly impacted on me for the first 3 days of the competition. Initially I thought I was flying OK, but soon I realised that OK was not going to be good enough. By Wednesday afternoon I was back in 5th position and many points away from the Top 3. It was becoming demoralising and it wasn’t doing much for my confidence before the Worlds.

Sean Kavanagh had joined our team for the event. Sean is going to be part of our team (Team Robertson) for the Worlds and this was the week to see how we all worked together. I have crewed for Sean at many Worlds and Nationals, but we have never tried it the other way around. It had been a long time since he had been on the ground for a competition and was heard on many occasions to say things like “it is so frustrating when you tell them where to go and then they don’t do it”.

In an effort to turn the game around, Sean and I spent some time on the Wednesday afternoon psychoanalysing me and deconstructing my flying style. We scrutinised everything I was doing prior and during a flight. It really was incredible that during that hour discussion we discovered a number of key things that I was doing mentally wrong which were affecting my performance. There were things I had been doing for the last 15 years of competing that I had never recognised as being an issue.

Reflecting on a good morning

The next morning I woke up feeling like my brain had been rebooted and things definitely turned around. My pre-flight planning was spot on, the balloon started going where I wanted it too and my marker drops became more accurate. I managed to get Top 3 results in 9 of the following 10 tasks and picked up the 1000 points for four of them. After 2 flights I managed to jump from 5th up to 1st place. I had a 300 point lead over Adam Barrow, who had been leading the competition from the first flight.

James helping pack up

Friday afternoon was the last flight. Having got into 1st place, I was quietly hoping for the flight to be cancelled. Like the previous afternoons (that had been cancelled) it was warm and it had been pretty thermic during the day. David Levin had declared a Hesitation Waltz task at the briefing, however when we got to the field they called a supplementary briefing and changed the task to a Pilot Declared Goal due to a major shift in the winds. The weather turned good and the green flag went up. After letting off a lot of pibals, we found we only had about 10 degrees of steerage. Even worse, there weren’t any easily achievable goals within those 10 degrees. This was going to be a game of roulette.

Seconds before lift-off, I quickly made a decision between 2 goals that were along the same road, and I shoved my declaration into the hand of my observer. I pulled the quick release and instantly went the wrong direction. A lot of swearing started happening in my basket.

With Adam so close behind me points wise and the unforgiving scoring system, I spent most of the flight watching what he was doing. With the rest of the pilots a comfortable distance from me in the points, Adam was my only concern. It had become a match race flight to determine who would win the Canowindra Cup. When I wasn’t watching Adam, I was looking at the arrow on my computer hoping for a light thermal, some random gust or even for a bird to fart. I needed anything that would give me a left turn, but there was nothing.
I was about 5 minutes away from my intersection and I saw Adam drop down low over the other intersection I had thought about selecting. He was low and he looked close. I could see 1st place disappearing. More swearing occurred.

Then something happened. I happened to see Paul Gibbs, who was about 500m in front of me, go up and as he did so, he got a light kick to the left (ironically which he didn’t need). I went down to the same height as him and the kick wasn’t there. Even more swearing occurred. There was nothing else I could do but just sit at that level and hope that a miracle would occur.

And then it did. Ever so slightly the arrow on the computer started turning. It was so subtle that without the computer showing it I would never have known it was there. I only needed 3 degrees of left and I managed to get just 2 degrees. I knew this wasn’t going to get me over the intersection but it was a free throw task so near enough would have to be good enough. When my computer and clinometre told me I was about 60 meters from intersection, I spun the marker as fast as I could and threw it. In typical fashion, the marker looked like it was falling forever and then it finally landed what looked like about 30 meters from the intersection.

Landing in First Place

As soon as I had flown the required 200 metres, I landed in the first paddock I could. I grabbed my phone and rang Adam. Expecting him to tell me he dropped a couple of metres, he informed me that he had actually dropped 34 metres. My observer was just about to measure my marker and I knew it was going to be really close. After what seemed like an eternity, Kath announced over the radio that my marker was 27 metres from my goal. I had won the Barrow/Robertson match race, the task and the event.

I must thank everybody involved in organising the event; the organisers, the sponsors, the officials, the observers and the other teams. Jan and Graham Kerr (once again) put in a heroic effort to run yet another fantastic event. Special thanks must also go to David Levin for coming such a long way to run the event. I could not have asked for a better practice week before heading over to the Worlds.
Finally, I would like to thank my team; Jan, Rob, Kath and James for being a great family unit, skilled team and doing a great job of tolerating all my mood swings. Also special thanks must go to Sean Kavanagh for joining Team Robertson. Not only did he lend me his balloon and his time, but he also did a great job of fixing me mentally.

Winners are grinners

Our team worked so well together and I am hoping we can be as successful at Battle Creek.

Max and Zoe

I have been really slack posting. Actually I have been pretty slack doing anything since Christmas. We finally got to do some flying in Binalong over Easter. The weather was a bit frustrating, in that it kept being windy at sunrise and then would die down later in the morning. We did get in two flights.

The first morning I flew Carolyn and James. After an eventful, windy launch (including a small hole getting burnt in one panel of the balloon) from the Galong cemetery, we it ended up being a great flight.

The second flight was with Max and Zoe. We managed to fly into the Galong cemetery.

Below is the video from the first flight.