Team MBCU Rally Adventures: Time to catch up...2006

Almost caught up now...2006 was a less busy year for rallying due to fewer rallies and a minor scheduling conflict (wedding). Here are the deets:

Coast to Coast, April 29-30, 2006. Coast to Coast is always an adventure...whether it's domestic disputes outside your motel window after last call or driving over another team's obviously surplus muffler, this event produces memories. 2006 was no different.

I had high expectations of myself coming into this rally as it was my first navigating with the aid of a precision odometer. We borrowed the odo from a friend (thanks Brian!) as I was a still a little skeptical about dropping $300 on a box that looked like a Radio Shack kit (sorry Helius). Here's Stephen getting it all wired up:

The Helius odo has 1 meter precision and other nifty features like freeze and bump to help maintain accuracy over long regs.

C2C covered over 700 km this year. Day 1 took us from Port Alberni to Nitinaht and back. There were a few navigational errors (even during the odo check before the 1st reg) on the day but we managed to come out with only 121 points over 35 checkpoints. Strangely enough, the most tense moment of the day was when the fancy odo lost power about 2 minutes before the start of reg #1. We were able to make a very quick fix to get it up and running before the reg but it was close. Day 2 was spent going in all directions in the general area around Port Alberni. We improved on day one with a score of 66. We ended up with 187 points total to capture 3rd in calculator class and 7th overall out of 14 teams.

If anyone is wondering if their car would be good enough for TSD rallying...

Heart of Darkness, May 13-14, 2006. Two short weeks later we were back at it again with the HoD Hope-Merritt-Hope all-nighter. I've lost my route book so I don't really have much to report other than I must have made more than 1 heinous navigational error because we ended up with 571 points for 6th in our class (out of 7) and 8th overall (out of 14). Sorry, no pix for this one.

Gold Digger, August 26-27, 2006. GD moved back to it's original locale of Pemberton this year. Again, no log book can be found but the event was memorable enough by itself. The short story is, we had our best event ever. After the initial results were in, we were 1st overall! Unfortunately, one checkpoint was out of position and the checkpointers were apparently not recording things very accurately. Most cars were 33 late for this checkpoint and we were 27 early. If you do the math, with the car in front of us being that late, us being that early and starting a minute behind the car in front of us, we would have been right on their bumper but we were sure that we never saw another car during any of the regs. That checkpoint got tossed out and resulted in a 33 point improvement for 2nd place and a 27 point improvement for 1st...which meant we had now swapped spots as we were less than 6 points apart before the correction.

Oh well, victory was sweet while it lasted. We didn't even get to keep hold of 1st in our class either as the team that won was also a calculator team. At least we beat all of the unlimited teams.

Midnight...cancelled. Boo.

Totem, November 18-19, 2006. Snow rallies are my favourite and Totem is one of the reasons why. Two days of fun in the car; sliding around on the snow/ice. Even the hotel in Williams Lake was nice. Teams come from far and wide for this one. Stephen and I managed a very respectable 69 points for 11th overall (out of 25) and 3rd in our class (out of 6). We obviously had no offs to tell about at this event. We did have an ominous start though...right before we were about to start on the 1st reg of the day, a truck + horse trailer pulled up and started chatting with another car parked further up the road. The truck stayed and chatted while blocking the road until 15 s after our scheduled start time! We weren't very impressed with the other team to say the least. Oh well, that was our worst hiccup of the day so we can't complain to much.