Was watching Coach Rudi yesterday at Switchblade, immediately starting practice on the basic loops, rolls and Immelman turns, after maidening the new Cleopatra Fish and the mob having left.
It then dawned on me that the Durban team was for the fourth year in a row squandering valuable practice time, aided and abetted by those who should know better, old hands Dave and Russ. Certainly no excuse about weather either, probably the best winds in a couple of decades.....
Yes it is a great weekend away in perfect slope conditions with like minded people and results secondary but a bit of encouragement from Adi saw fifteen minutes of practice turn the tricky alternating role from a disaster to something relatively reasonable - it certainly helps ease the stress if you know what to do before the time!
A flu relapse had precluded this week's Jo'burg trip but cabin fever and a rare power failure drove yours truly out the home to seek medicine and plot this simple exercise, to gently prod the folk along.
A half dozen of the most reasonable (personally) option manoeuvres were selected and some manual cut and past saw the mandatory manoeuvres stuck on one A4 page and the "reasonable" options stuck on another A4 page, with the total A3 then shrunk down on to A4 and heat laminated for feathers, per the pics below. The logic for my expert class was to exclude the masochistic four point rolling circle and eight point roll and then work backwards from highest K factor. The reason for putting six options instead of four options on the back page was so that six could be practiced and the final four determined just before the event.
The logic on the extra practice routine was because I had been fortunate at the last minute to be talked out of the simple looking but damn tricky inverted flat eight by Russ and Michel a couple of years ago, as some of the Toss locals showed in running out of down elevator and space!
This same red herring inverted flat eight manoeuvre shows up again in Sportsman where again the newbies might be tempted, so thought it worth doing a similar exercise for the Sportsman class, where I would likely be guiding a couple of folk. The outside stall turn and 3 turn spin joined the inverted flat eight on the scrap heap, along with the below eight K factor too simple and cheap options.
This left seven option manoeuvres to practice with the theory that the more hot stick folk like Dean start with the higher K factor stuff at the bottom and the clubbies like Rudi and Mark aim from the top of the shortened list with lower but still useful K factor stuff. All theory and all are obviously welcome to do their own thing - the sheets will be there if you wish to give it a whirl, though :-)
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| Rough cut and paste before shrinking |
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| The final product, heat shrunk in A5, mandatory front and option back |
TOSS 2012 Dave suggested Sportsman practice
TOSS 2012 Dave Expert class practice
A look at the other freebase half pipe compo suggests it will suffer from the same K factor thing of a couple of years ago, where a very average high K factor score still blitzed a well flown medium K factor. I have not a clue how to approach that event, should be quite a giggle...... ;-)
