Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Surprisingly, this is all you can get out of a Pontiac Vibe:

From misc

The car keeps going after that point, but not the odometer. It just stops at 299999. A little web searching verified this, and Canadian cars only go to 299999 km. Seems like Pontiac/Toyota had low expectations for their cars.

Carrying my stuff out to launch at Ascutney, two trips.

Climbing the NW side of Ascutney from the "Africa" LZ up to the summit parking lot where my car was. Normally there's either a designated driver, or enough people show up that we can stash a car near the LZ, or the pilot will hitchhike around the mountain and up the auto road. But I was the only one flying, and my mother told me to never hitchhike, so climbing seemed like the thing to do. The woods were actually quite nice, and I enjoyed the climb quite a lot, though some of the other pilots seemed incredulous when they found out that I had done this (I had been eyeing the possibility for quite a while). At first glance it seems interesting that, at a walking pace, I managed to do in 70 minutes what took me 52 in the race last year. On the other hand, I took a more direct route, though for serious climbing, the vertical is a lot more important than the distance. Turns out that the field I landed in is 300 feet higher than the base of the auto road, so I did only 2000 feet of climbing, as opposed to 2300 in the race.

Carrying my stuff out of the LZ to the car. Includes the time spent getting the slugs off the bottom of the glider bag.

Flight time was 10 minutes. Most pilots would have considered a day like this to be an unmitigated disaster, I think.

NE Canoe-O Champs at Bear Hole (Massasoit State Park in Taunton, MA).I did the Elite course in Aims's C1, and won, primarily due to the low turnout that meant I was the only one on the Elite course. Nice course on a map that had four distinct water bodies and easy trails connecting them. Total distance covered was 9.6 km, of which about 4.5 km was paddling, 3 km was carrying the boat, and 2.2 km was running without the boat (out-and-back legs that account for most of the additional distance above the straight-line route).

The one error was pretty comical -- I was carrying the boat across a peninsula, and couldn't read the map when the boat was on my head. I went to what I thought was the right spot to drop the boat, but I wasn't positive where I was. Heading in the diection that I expected the control to be, and primarily going downhill because the feature was a pond that I figured would be in a depression (no contours on the map), I found it without much trouble. Heading back, though, it seemed that I had taken a slightly roundabout route, so I headed back on what I thought was a more direct way to where I had left the boat. Before too long I had to leave the trail because it was going the wrong way, and then I found myself in somewhat thick woods wondering where I had left my boat (with the map in it). What saved me was the fact that I had cleverly left the boat on top of a hill, so I just kept going up until I found it. Not a huge amount of time lost, as the leg was only 7:38, which included carrying the boat the rest of the way across the peninsula and paddling to the next control.

Picking up controls with Aims at Massasoit, using the C2 Cruiser. This was a mixture of paddling, jogging separately from Aims, and pulling the boat on a very cool little two-wheel dolly.

Massasoit is an interesting place, pretty nice woods, but the park has been closed for a couple of years due to lack of funds. According to Aims, the death knell came when they had electrical power problems and determined that the underground wiring had corroded, plus they were having plumbing troubles. There wasn't enough money to repair the infrastructure, so they eliminated the staff as well. It still gets used by a lot of people, but it's more like a state forest than a state park now, and nature is just beginning to reclaim everything. It's a state ghost park.