Ballooning Nationals, Benalla.

We came 7th. Out of 24. Not bad - I was hoping for top 10, so pretty happy. The one downer was that we were up to 4th at one stage, but then I had a brain fade on the Wednesday arvo flight/task then never really recovered. A few cancelled flights after that didn't help, but we learned from the mistake - so next time......watch out for team Wrightie!

It was a fabulous week, the weather was mostly good albeit a tad wet when we first arrived. Benalla really needed the rain though and it greened everything up beautifully. Our digs weren't bad - a cabin with a good heater in a caravan park right near the airport and our neighbours were the 2 Kavanagh teams and Tim Steiner's team, so we had a good group to hang out with during the quiet times.

On the whole, I thought the event was a great success. Credit needs to go to the organisers; Adam Barrow & Gary Pask and their organising committee, a) for getting up and doing something, b) for getting it together in a relatively short time (5 months I think) and c) for laying down a strong foundation for future Nationals in Benalla. I'd never flown there before but was impressed by the relatively easy access to launch and landing sites, the friendliness of the local landowners (we only had one grumpy so & so who wouldn't let us launch from his property - maybe us waking him and his wife at 8.00 on a Sunday morning had something to do with it!) and the general way in which the local communities embraced the event. It's only my perception, but I don't recall any bad stories from any of the other competitors.

A good example of how well it was received was at the night glow on the 1st Saturday night. The chosen location was Devenish, a little hamlet about half an hour north of Benalla. It has a population of around 200 I'm told, yet about 3,000 people turned up for the event - not bad I say.

Apart from generally having a goodtime flying and socialising the definite highlight of the week was taking Isobel for her first flight. It was the Sunday after the awards night and it was a perfect morning for a balloon flight. Clear sky, frost on the ground and a light southerly breeze, the sort of conditions where one would expect to see a few balloonists out having fun. So it was odd when we took off to see that we were the only ones in the sky. Simon Beare and his mate Ferdinand came out to crew for us and we met up with a couple of friendly locals who had been observers for the comp - Paul & Kaye Berry. We had a great morning, everybody got to fly and Izzy is now an officially baptised balloonist!

You can see photos by clicking on this link--> BenallaNationals2007

An interesting story: I was pretty sure that at 4 months old, Izzy would be one of the youngest people to fly in a balloon, but also pretty sure that somewhere, someone would have flown a younger child. I found out that an English pilot, David Bareford, had inflated a balloon in the car park of the hospital in which each of his three kids had been born and flown each of them away at the age of a few days! Now that is a genuine balloonatic!!