Awards

This morning the sky was clear blue and dotted with puffy cumulus. I felt a momentary shock. Would we fly today? I hadn’t really planned for that eventuality. Our retrieve team had disintegrated and Kevin had left with the truck. My gear was all packed up to travel.

On closer examination I realized that those puffy cumulus clouds were racing out of the north at 60 miles an hour. I headed for the briefing on automatic pilot. I didn’t even bother to sign up for alternate launch. There would be no launching today. Belle, our driver, text messaged me asking if she should show up for the briefing. Yes, I replied. I still needed to pay her, and I wanted to do it soon so that if I finally cracked and had to bail out of town I wouldn’t have any obligations unfulfilled.

There were quite a few of us die hards left, all things considered. We had a very short briefing and then the awards ceremony was scheduled for 1pm. There were a pile of awards to give out. Heather and Carol work very hard to sign up sponsors and get complimentary merchandise for awards. Since there had been so little flying some of the awards had to get a little creative. There were only three women flying in the comp and there was only one competition day. Two of the three landed in the bomb-out that day, but they got 2^nd and 3^rd place nevertheless. Similarly, there was only one glider in floater class, and two in kingposted. They were in the bomb-out as well. In the open class at least the top ten had all made goal, but you could tell that everyone knew that the results really weren’t a realistic measure of the pilots. First second and third still took home sizeable cash awards. The whole event seemed very surreal. It was like a pretend award ceremony for a competition that never occurred.

There was a new award this year at Bogong. Heather’s brother had died in a helicopter accident last year, and her family put together a memorial sportsmanship award. The intent was for it to go to the one pilot that the others felt made the comp better for everyone. These things tend to be extremely subjective, and so often end up being more of a popularity contest than anything else. Of course the award has special significance to Heather, and although she is usually very tough and composed, she had a hard time maintaining her composure as she went through the preliminaries.

The result of our vote was the award went to Joerg Bajewski. I couldn’t possibly think of a more deserving recipient. Joerg isn’t the best pilot out there, and he rarely shows up in the top ten, but he always has a smile and a great sense of humor. Through all the frustrations of the week Joerg kept us smiling. It was ironic and fitting that in the end this award that had many of us cynically rolling our eyes when we first heard about it became the most real and appropriate award of the competition.