Training Log Archive: CleverSky

US CMO Champs - Classic, 8th place. A better start than previous years, perhaps attributable to my preparations. I'll take the SA assessment as correct that I had three errors, none of them too bad. Couldn't find my GPS watch, so I don't know the actual distance.

US CMO Champs - Sprint, 6th place. Another decent run. My order was 49-54-53-55-58-57-52-56-59-51-50-60, ot in other words, more or less CCW. I had been planning to get 59 before 52, and I think that would have been better, but I got caught up in a train with Steve Richardson and Rick DeWitt (I think), and next thing I knew I was at 51, so I had to revise my plan. And in retrospect, maybe going in the opposite direction would have been slightly better. Still didn't have the GPS watch, so the distance is still a guess.

US CMO Champs - Trail-O. For anybody who has been wondering these past several months, CMT is unrelated to CMC, it's actually Corn Maze Trail-O, and CMT training is practice drone flying. Two flights with the balloons in the maze, the first of which actually got all of the needed data, and the second was just in case I missed the middle two balloons. Turned out that it was the rightmost balloon that I almost missed, but I was able to locate that one using the traditional method anyway.

This third edition of the CMT event was the easiest to date, as evidenced by the results, as well as the distances to the balloons (see below). This probably made the event less dependent on luck and therefore more fair. Although I turned in the first perfect score, Ian was damn close, and the next ten weren't far behind; I'm guessing that maybe they all got 3 out of 4 right (though some might have gotten 2 out of 4 and just missed the other two). I might have had more of an advantage if it had been harder, although as it was, I was reasonably confident but not certain when I handed in my entry. More wind and I would have been busted, and I was concerned about the possibility of a piloting error resulting in the drone dropping into the maze, where it would sit there blinking its lights until somebody (hopefully) spotted it during the night-O.

For my efforts, I got a cash prize of 500 Mexican pesos, which appears to be worth $27. Not bad! I wonder what that will buy in Tijuana...

2014, 3 controls: 83, 93, 117 m from viewing platform
2015, 5 controls, 80, 105, 105, 137, 144 m from viewing platform
2016, 4 controls, 37, 44, 60, 133 m from viewing platform

C • I'm quite sure that 500 pes... 3

US CMO Champs - Night-O, 7th place. Well, the GPS watch turned out to be sitting in the speedometer of my car, and I found it wen Nancy and I drove over to the Frostee for dinner. Definitely sloppier in the dark, but no complete disasters. I had two skips, and I picked #1 and #11. Three errors? Maybe. Certainly #2 (kind of wasted that skip, should have started out more sedately), but I guess most of it wasn't so bad. Ten seconds behind Phil (I started earlier and finished earlier), but he got more skips than I did.

Third place overall. I'm pretty pleased with that. First and second were way out of reach, and the Trail-O result sure halped, but I did okay on the real races, too.

Control pickup (in the dark) - balloon #4, #35, #40, #41, #39, #34.

On the Hudson with Nancy. First out to, and around, the Hudson-Athens lighthouse, then a trip up the river and into the wind, figuring it would be easy to drift back. The intended turnaround point was further than it looked, and although the return leg started out seeming easy, it paradoxically got much harder. Nancy noted that when she'd stop paddling, her boat would rapidly come to a halt, and I observed that when I just sat there, although I was going downstream with the wind at my back and swells moving in my direction, I was backing up. I concluded that it was due to the tide coming in, even so far up the river, and when I saw water flowing the wrong way under the bridge over a tributary, it was pretty clear that that was the case. On the plus side, there were a few stretches where I was able to get up enough speed to surf the swells -- fun! The park did have one of these roller launches which Nancy used and greatly enjoyed, like launching an ocean liner. But the river was a little hazardous, with some power boats that either couldn't see us or didn't care if they flipped us with their wake.

Lanni Orchards. Yes. Seriously.

C • Excellent! 2

And then back through in the other direction. Intentionally took some alternate, longer routes for additional practice. I'm sure I was one of their more unconventional customers.

Fitchburg Reservoir (Caroline's house) with Nancy.