Crestline Trail Rally 2008, Sept. 6-7

Crestline Trail Rally is a new event this year that replaced the very enjoyable C2C event that we had competed in in years past. We had high hopes for this TSD as we do for all 2-day rallies.

The starting point was the Holiday Inn Osoyoos. We arrived late on Friday night to find a nice hotel with comfortable beds. Our hotel luck has been somewhat spotty in the past (no heat in February, no hot water, sofa beds missing half of their slats...) so it was a relief to finally have a room with two normal beds. Apparently the hotel location is good too as we could see the lake from the stairwell between our room and the parkade. So far so good although no beach for us. :(

Day 1

We set our alarms so that we could get the gravel tires on before the tech crew became available at 7:00. Tech was a breeze although there were a few comments about the wiring under the hood. I will say no more. The organizers went out of their way for this event and had secured tire storage for us so it was just a matter of putting the street tires into a pickup and then we didn't have to worry about them until the end of the rally. What service!

After tech, we headed up to the hotel restaurant to sign in and get a copious supply of swag along with the route book. In a gesture of kindness to the co-drivers, we got the instructions for both days in the same book. I now had dreams of day 2 and being able to get out of the car before the first gas stop...kinda like a driver. I have to say it was nice when it happened.

We had the drivers meeting after breakfast and were out on the road shortly afterwards on our way towards Grand Forks and the first reg. The route instructions left time for us to enjoy the viewpoint overlooking the lake on the east side which I thought was a nice touch. I've been many places over the past few years but I wouldn't recognize half of them as I've usually had my head down looking at my route instructions.

During the odo check, we realized that we had not filled up the tank after our drive to Osoyoos from Vancouver. Oops. I quickly started calculating how many kilometres we had before the gas stop and we determined that we were going to be cutting it very close. To add to the stress, we missed a turn between the odo check and reg 1...wasting precious gas!!

The start of reg 1 put us near this curious assortment of signs. It's obvious that the kids playing here had way more fun than I did when I was growing up.

Reg 1 wasn't stellar for us, 6 points over 3 checkpoints but not a horrible start. With much relief, we encountered a gas station in Rock Creek during the first transit. Much relief. Very much relief. It was readily apparent after reg 1 that we would not be getting our usual TSD fuel efficiency so this station saved our asses.

Reg 2 was going great...until our odo stopped working around 14 kilometres in. Power was OK but there was no speed reading or distance update. Panic ensued. We rallied for over a year with the stock odo but I was not anxious to go back. To add to the excitement, shortly after the odo failure we encountered a herd of cows on the road. Most were pretty good at moving aside but three calves decided that the best option (not sure for who) would be to gallop, as cows apparently can, down the road in a straight line. After about 200 m, two of the calves found enough room at the side of the road to let us by. The third, and smallest, calf kept going straight for another 100 m or so. We finally came upon a clearing that the calf ignored at first and then eventually decided that it would be a good place to escape. Once in the clearing, the calf seemed to speed up once in the open. People say bears are deceptively fast...now I know small cows are too. Anyhow, after 6 kilometers or so of navigation by stock odo, the precision odo started working again. It was too late though, we were 15 seconds late to a checkpoint just before the 17 km mark. I blame the cows for that one.

At the end of the reg, we paused to check the odo wiring and found that our superior 'twist-tie' method of splicing had failed on the sensor line. I redid the splice (with hockey tape this time!) and it was OK for the rest of the rally.

To the rest of our bad karma out of the way early, we almost stalled the car at the start of reg 3. Stephen recovered gracefully though and we finished without the reg without any further problems. Reg 3 was to be our first of many passes through sections of road that would be used many more times during the rally. It was good in some ways as we got multiple attempts at some really fun corners but it was also a little boring too as the not-so-exciting sections didn't get any more exciting the 2nd, 3rd and 4th times through. Our scores did improve by the end though.

Between regs 5 and 6, we stopped in Midway for gas and lunch. I will say that, while service was slow, the bun of my sandwich was top-notch. Good enough to write about.

On the way to reg 7, the last of the day, we encountered this scene at the entrance to Cox Valley. It was so amazing we both were thinking the same thing: picture! We stopped for a few minutes to enjoy the view a take a few pix. The camera really doesn't do justice to the colours and textures we saw.

Before reg 7 started, Stephen checked the shocks and determined that we had been riding at the firmest setting rather than the softest setting. To say the suspension had been bone-jarring since the upgrade last November is a bit of an understatement. With the new adjustments made, the ride was much more comfortable although some further tweaking was required later on to get the handling just right for Stephen. We finished reg 7 in comfort and only with 4 points despite me completely missing the call on a fork in the road.

At the end of day 1, we had 37 points for 1st in our class and 5th overall.

The organizers really did organize everything for us. We drove up to the hotel and were handed the door cards for our room. Dinner had been pre-arranged so we just had to relax for a bit, head to the restaurant and then sit down and eat. Once we were done dinner, we headed back to the hotel where I finished the calcs for day 2 and then hit the sack.

Day 2

The second day was without unnecessary excitement from a TSD point of view. We headed out through the same roads we had been travelling for most of day 1 and then had two more regs on new roads followed by reg 1 in reverse to end the day. During reg 2, I had to keep correcting the odo by bumping it down 10 m every few km. At the end of the reg, I took a guess at how many bumps I made and recalculated our calibration setting for the odo. It seemed to work as I didn't have any problems for the rest of the day.

Our route on day 2 took us in a loop north around Osoyoos and brought us back to civilization near Oliver. We ended up at Smitty's for a late lunch, results and prizes. We scored 14 points on the day for 51 in total. This is one of our better two-day TSD scores and was good enough to keep us 1st in class and move us up one spot to 4th overall (out of 9 teams competing). All in all a good way to finish. After lunch, we grabbed the street tires, swapped them on for the gravels and headed home.

Coming into this rally, we knew it would be the last for while for Team MBCU as Stephen had plans for another continent for the next few years. It was great to finish with a solid effort a such a fantastic event. Our hats go off to the organizers for this one as it truly was one of the most well organized events we've attended.

In a few short years, we went from zero experience to novice champions to calculator class champions. What a blast and it never would have happened (for me) without Stephen being kind enough to ask me if I wanted to join in.

Gold Digger 2007, Aug 18

After our no-show at C2C, Gold Digger was to be our first TSD on gravel tires. "What do gravel tires look like?" you ask. They look much they'd do a much better job on gravel than all-season tires...that's what. The tires have a soft compound, deep tread and a very strong bead. They also happen to make a lot of noise and have a relatively short tread-life.

GD 2007 was quite uneventful as far as the usual 'events' that happen; no offs, no wrong turns, no close calls...nothing. We scored well enough (75 in 19 checkpoints) to finish 2nd overall and 1st in our class. Turnout was a little dismal for this event with only 6 teams competing.

The gravel tires were obviously a success though and even I could notice the difference in the corners. Traction was much improved and it was easier to maintain CAS in the corners.

Some of you may have been wondering what the route instructions look like. Here you go. The highlighted numbers in the 2nd column are the 'car average speed' numbers (CAS). The TSD column is the distance in km (with 10 m accuracy) and the rightmost column is the instruction corresponding to the distance. Some instructions are just informational like SOR (sign on right), others are for cautions and then the rest are actual directional instructions like KL (keep left), SA (straight ahead).

You can see my calculated times in pencil on the right side of the page. The top of the 2nd column is the start time for the non-existant car 0...7:08 in this example. Since we were car 5, we start 5 minutes after car 0 at 7:13 which I have indicated as 13:00.

The distance at the next instruction is calculated as follows:

13 min 00 s + (0.84 km - 0.00 km) * 60 kph/45 kph = 14 min 07 s

I use a calculator that works in degrees/minutes/seconds so that I don't have to bother with calculations in decimal and then conversion to minutes/seconds. When there is a large distance between route instructions (eg. between instructions 3 and 4 above), I will calculate times for distances at 1 km or 0.5 km intervals after the last instruction so that I can still check our time along the way.

I must be done calculations as I'm not looking at my lap.


The Sunday morning tire change before heading home.

Coast to Coast 2007...our biggest late ever.

Sooooo...we registered for C2C in anticipation of a fun but shorter than usual romp on the island. I say shorter than usual as Coast was reduced from its usual 2-day format to an overnighter starting on May 12th for 2007. I hope this is not the start of a trend.

We were cutting it very close by planning on catching the 15:00 ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo and then driving to Campbell River before tech closed at 19:00. Stephen had just bought some used gravel tires and rims and was getting them mounted on Saturday morning. He was doing some work on the car at his brother's place in Port Moody and the mounting was getting done at a local tire shop. The tire shop was running late so Stephen headed home to Kits without the tires. Shortly before I was going to head out to Stephen's, the tires were finished so I picked them up on my way out to Kits and we decided to mount them and make a dash for the ferry rather than sticking with the usual all-season tires.

The mounting went quickly and we were on our way but it was going to be a close. Unfortunately, we were not close enough and we missed the sailing to Nanaimo. Since we were almost at the ticket booth when the ferry was leaving the dock, we made a quick decision to try the Langdale ferry and then hope that we would be able to make the necessary connections up the Sunshine Coast and across to Comox. In very little time, we were aboard the Langdale ferry where we took it upon ourselves to verify our plan by checking an actual Power River ferry schedule. It didn't take long for us to realize our plan was as half-baked as it sounded. There was no way we were going to make it to Campbell River on time.

We arrived in Langdale, called the rally organizer and let him know the error of our ways and then enjoyed a nice dinner at Molly's Reach (think Beachcombers). Here is Langdale in all it's glory:

36th T-Bird Rally, Feb 17-18 2007

The 36th sort-of-annual T-Bird (actually the 50'th anniversary of T-Bird #1...a few years in hiatus I guess) was my 2nd T-Bird and Stephen's 3rd. I had to miss last year on account of an awesome honeymoon trip to New Zealand. ;)

All cars are welcome at T-Bird.


We competed as part of 6 car team called..........wait for it..........Team eis munky!!


The team consisted of:

• us in Stephen's 2002 Subaru Impreza WRX wagon (calculator class).
• Peter and Tim Ryce in a 1988 Mazda 323 GTX (unlimited).
• Gil Stuart and Briane Carriere in a 1967 Volvo GT123 (historic).
• Rob and Lucille Anderson in a 2006 Subaru Impreza STi (novice).
• Gord Ryall and Jen Daly in a 1991 Subaru Legacy (calculator).
• Alan and Emma Perry in a 1997 Audi A4 (paper)
  

This T-Bird was a decidedly less snowy affair than the 2005 version. Less snowy == more muddy this time of year. Some of the mud was so bad that the final regularity of day 2 had to be cancelled!

As usual, T-Bird started off in Merritt under the glowing pink neon trim of the Best Western motel. The 1st regularity of day 1 passed without incident. We were car 25 so I had plenty of time for calcs before the start of the reg. We ended up zeroing three checkpoints in a row only to be 10 late on the final checkpoint. Reg 2 was also successful...we scored just 12 points and had some fun hydroplaning across potentially car-swallowing puddles. By the time we arrived at Rally HQ in Vernon, we only had 47 points on the day; good enough for 17th out of 48 cars.

After grabbing dinner at HQ and getting the results, we headed off to our 'hotel' for the night. For a change, we happened to be staying at the nicest rally hotel ever: Chez Michael and Joan in nearby Coldwater. Heating, hot water, no domestic disputes at 2 AM, good rates (free!) and excellent company! What more could you ask for?

Day 2 started out with some mud, then some snow and then some cancelling due to mud. We were a little shocked in reg 1 to find car 26 right on our tail about halfway in. I was pretty sure we were on time and I was right for a change...they dropped back after awhile but not without getting a 52-early on a checkpoint. Ouch.

The second reg of the day ended up producing what has arguably been one of the most butt-clenching moments of our rally careers to date. We were approaching an acute left at km 23.84. It was nice, wide and flat. Stephen could see it coming and was well prepared (especially after the recent ice-racing days at Burns Lake). To make things even more perfect, there was a checkpoint at the turn and we were only 2 late. Anyhow, back to the butt-clenching...

Stephen gave the car a little flick to the right and turned into the corner. The car started oversteer slightly and Stephen was maintaining a perfect drift around the apex.


Drifting..yeaahhhh!!!


Unfortunately, there were 24 cars before us to polish up the road and we started to fishtail instead of straightening out nice and smooth.


As we started heading for the snowbank, car drifting forwards and to the left (no more rotating at this point), we saw a rather large tree approaching from the left. Regardless of how slow we were moving, the car is no match for a tree. Even with the pre-damaged special rally bumper Stephen keeps installing every rally, this tree would have laughed at the bumper had any altercation between the two arisen. We just kept coasting with no traction across the glass-like road. Snowbank approaching, tree right behind it. The tree was now dead centre in front of the car and we were still heading on a trajectory about 45 degrees left of straight forward. Getting closer. Tree getting bigger. Not sure we're going to miss it. Poof! Snow everywhere! No crunching noise. No crunching noise? Yay!! Here's how close we came:



After we let our sphincters unwind for a couple seconds, we sprang into action. I ran back to the corner to put out our triangle (didn't want anyone trying to park in the same spot) and Stephen grabbed our spiked floor-mats to see if they could give us enough traction to get off the bank. Sadly, we were quite a bit 'off' and would need a pull. Car 26 went by as we were trying to extricate ourselves with the mats we were almost ready with the but car 27 was kind enough to stop and let us hook up the tow rope to get us out of there.



Credit to Warwick Patterson of Formula Photographic for the photos. All photos of the 'off' are copyright Formula Photographic.

Unfortunately, we tied up the road for a minute caused a bit of a log-jam for a few cars behind us. The next checkpoint about 4 km down the road saw us 260 late. Better late than never.

Here is the T-Bird thread from NASIOC that also discusses the events of the day.

By the way, did I say mud?


After 2 days of rallying, we finished with 331 points (most from the drift-gone-bad) for 25th place out of 48 cars. Sadly, our team effort did not do so well. Out of 6 team entries, we ended up last on account of a DNF or two. You have to finish first to finish first.

We didn't come away empty-handed though! Awards were given out for the 2006 year and Stephen and I were awarded 2nd place driver/co-driver in the 2006 BC TSD championship for calculator class.

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.

Totem was also the debut of our fabulous new window name bars!!

Here we are lined up ready to go on day 2.

Post rally...it's a good day when it's hard to see the colour of the car from behind.

Time to catch up...2005

Well, what can I say...I'm way behind...time to catch up on over a year of events. Here's a quick rundown of 2005 (except C2C which I've already covered):

Heart of Darkness, April 30, 2005. In the words of another competitor(from www.rallybc.com), HoD is as follows: "Start in Hope at 2300, turn around in Merritt, finish in Chilliwack around 0800". That's pretty much it. This was our first all-nighter together. My memory is somewhat faded at this point but the main thing I remember is that, at 5 in the morning, I start taking 90 second micro-naps that certainly diminish my usefulness as a navigator. Our score over 23 checkpoints was 91 for 7th place overall (out of 11 cars), 1st in novice and 2nd in calculator. Interesting fact: it is possible to blow out your rear window if you go over a cattle-guard just right.


Gold Digger, July 23, 2005. Gold Digger this year was from Lytton to Cache Creek and back. This rally was also an overnighter. We stopped for dinner at Boston Pizza in Chilliwack on the way out to Lytton. What we expected to be a relatively quick dinner went on way too long due to slow service. We ended up getting to rally HQ as teams were heading out. I got the route book and started calcs while Stephen went through tech inspection and then we were on our way. The route was quite difficult in that some regs were very hard to maintain CAS on. I also recall a close encounter with a horse at the side of the road (just standing there, but awfully close to the road). We placed 5th out of 15 cars, 1st in novice, 1st in calculator. Our total score was 150.

Apparently our number flew off mid-rally and we improvised with garbage bag and hockey tape.

Midnight, October 29, 2005. This was our first repeat rally. I resolved to not make as many navigational errors as I had the previous year (not hard really). That must have come true as we only ended up with 92 points for 4th overall (out of 15), 2nd in calculator, 1st in novice. In 2004 (my first rally ever), we had 1192 points! As usual, we camped out at the ferry terminal before heading home on the first boat of the day.

Totem, November 19-20, 2005. Our second snow rally ever. We covered Cache Creek to Wells Gray on day 1. The start of the day was a little rough. Stephen discovered after the drivers meeting that the rear tires were swapped. While I started calculations in the passenger seat, Stephen did a record-time tire change. The tire pressure was a little low as well so Stephen filled them up with the 12V compressor. Once we were both in the car and ready to go, it wouldn't start. The compressor had drained the battery. The low-battery also messed up the security system so Stephen had to disconnect the battery entirely to reset it before we were on our way. The day was a challenge due to the snowy roads and pea-soup fog covering sections that would have been difficult to maintain CAS even in perfect daylight. There were a couple memorable moments as the day went on:

• We were approaching a left turn with an exposure overhead. As we approached, we saw a member of another team on the outside of the corner waving his safety triangle. We slowed down considerably and he waved us on. We didn't see his teammate or his car. Wait a sec...where did his car go? Shortly after the left was a hairpin right and, at the hairpin, looking back towards the previous left, we could see the other teams car at the bottom of the bank...waaayyyy down from the road. I'm sure glad it wasn't us. Apparently the team was picked up by sweep, had their car pulled up the bank the next day and were able to drive home.
• At one point, we hit a very icy patch after a corner, kept spinning and ended up backing over the snow bank. While running back up the road with our safety triangle and slipped and fell right smack in the middle of the road. I got up and out of the road ASAP so I wouldn't become traction for the next team. After some digging, pushing and rocking, we still couldn't get the car off the bank. Luckily for us, our novice competitors Matthew Glade and Kevin Boothroyd in the their trusty Tercel came by and helped us out at their expense in the standings. The slapped their chains on and gave us a quick pull off the bank. What great sportsmanship. We were out with the car in one piece and on our way. This is where it gets silly...about 400 m down the road something like this happened: (Me) "Hey, there's a checkpoint!" (Stephen) "Oh yeah." The front right wheel caught the deep snow at the side of the road as we both were marvelling at our bad luck of having an off right before a checkpoint. The car spun around in the opposite direction of the the first off and we went over the bank again...backwards...again. This time the car was not unscathed as the brand new bumper lost a bit of its lower lip. Stephen has since bought another new bumper but he's also kept the damaged one for rally duty (he can swap bumpers faster than anyone now).
  

Upon arrival in Wells Gray, we were treated to one of the worst rally motels ever. They're all bad but this motel was vying for #1. Our non-smoking room was definitely a smoking room, the pull-out bed was missing half of it's suspension and the bathroom had a bottle opener on the door (inside). Not that the last item is bad...it's just a little odd. The food in the restaurant was quite questionable as well. I recall a spaghetti dish that Matthew ordered that was so awful it had to go back to the kitchen; everyone at the table tasted a bit and agreed that it was the only humane thing to do.

Day 2 was fairly uneventful (at least according to my route book notes). I managed to meet up with my friend's mom in 100 Mile House on our gas/lunch break which was a nice treat. We left lunch just in time to get to the next reg but we didn't count on being stuck behind a minivan for a large chunk of one lane road on the way. We ended up having a flying start (3 minutes behind) for the post-lunch reg. The last transit to rally HQ in Cache Creek was a great way to end the day, it was a wonderfully twisty road with lots of crests and dips along the way.

We ended up 17th out of 26 teams with 1010 points. Not our greatest outing. This was also the first rally I performed calculations using a running calculation from the start of each reg to the finish in minutes:seconds instead of doing CAS changes first in cents (minutes/100) and then converting to minutes:seconds and filling in spots in between as time allowed. This greatly cleaned up my route book and also resulted in having calculations done for all instructions in the book. Thanks Michelle for that advice.


That's it for 2005...

Sunset from the car deck while the ferry was docking in Tsawwassen. Nice. 

Plenty of room for Doug (who was right behind us in the lineup). Talk about getting shafted. 

Last car on the ferry from Swartz Bay! Yessss!

Rally mud/dirt factor: 8...slight colour visible, chrome was completely covered. It took some effort to get through to the plate letters. 

Ready to go on the last reg. This was the first time navigators were aloud out of the vehicles except for bathroom breaks.

More of the last stage lineup. 

Lined up for the last reg.

Coast to Coast Rally, Day 2, May 15

Day 2 started out with a chill. What that means is we had no hot water in our hotel room. It turns out the entire hotel was out so we weren't any more hard done by than anyone else. We did manage to get a further room discount though.

The rallying for the day was much less eventful than the previous day. Again, that wasn't a hard accomplishment and we were both glad for it. We started out quite well on the first reg of the day with a total of -1 over the first five checkpoints. Unfortunately there was one more to go before the end of the reg and, in another unfortunate circumstance, it happened to be right after a pair of route instructions that fooled my novice navigating abilities. The first instruction was a KL with the tulip showing an actual right to avoid and then another that might be considered a SA MBCU. The next instruction was an AR and the tulip looked identical to the first except that instead of the SA MBCA at the end, that turn was taken. I didn't notice that the distance between these two instructions was 60 metres and I assumed that the first instruction would be complete (pass two roads on the right) before the next instruction/tulip was encountered. Needless to say, we missed the acute-right. I looked back on the acute right as we zipped by and noticed a checkpoint up the hill and I knew right away that I'd missed the call. Stephen got the car turned around ASAP but we were still 84 seconds late to the checkpoint. Lucky for us that was the last checkpoint of the reg. The rest of the reg was a short up followed by a long down with a stretch comprised of many sweeping wide turns. Stephen seemed quite happy in the turns trying to get us back on time.

The remaining regs were uneventful. Our worst checkpoint was 5 seconds early and we finished the day with a total of 101 points. Far better than the previous day's score of 1011. With such a dramatic turnaround on the 2nd day, we were able to capture 2nd in novice class and 13th overall for the event (there's that #13 again).

After the roundup at rally HQ, we headed to the ferry at Swartz Bay. We made good time to the ferry. In fact, it was just good enough...we were the last car onto the ferry. Sadly, Doug and Brian were right behind us in the Adrenaline Rally Golf but they were cut off. There was plenty of room behind us on the ferry deck for a Golf too. :(