Morris Minor 60th Aniversary Show

Well after a few months of being very busy I finally have some time to write a new entry in this blog.

HART was booked by the morris Minors Owners Association to do a rocket display at their large show, they asked us to do 2 mass launches of small rockets along with a rocket workshop which would run throughout both days.

On Friday the 4 members of HART turned up and were a bit shocked to find the main arena was only around 50 feet froma large wide river running through the estate and we all had visions of our rockets landing in or near the water.

Once we had set up we decided to do a few test launches to see what the wind was like and found that we had a small landing area to play with, but we needed to speak to the organsiers to make sure the arena was safe when we did the mass launch.

Saturday soon arrrived and so did the rain. Luckily the main HART stand was under cover but our flying plans were put on hold.

We hoped to do the first 60 mass launch at 11:00am but the rain was still pouring and the launch time was delayed 4 times until at long last at around 3pm the rain slowly stopped and gave us a small window of dry weather to launch.

The wind was still quite strong and blowing directly towards the river so we decided to launch just 20 rockets first, which would garantee that we still had 60 rockets available for the “official” opening of the show on Sunday.

Due to the damp weather we had a few small problems launching the rockets but on the 2nd attempt all 200 of the rockets lit within a second or so and shot into the sky.

The crowd gave us a nice round of applauses as the rockets slowly floated down and a number of children watching soon gave chase to the falling rockets and helped us gather the rockets.

The rest of the day we spent maning the stand and explaining the various rockets to the public.

The forecast for Sunday was for light rain in the early morning turning to a bright dry day, so before we returned to the b and b we spent time getting the 60 rockets prepared for the mass launch due for 10:00am the next day.

Unfortunately the weather forecasters forgot to mention the 50-60mph gale force winds that was also due for Sunday.

We arrived back at the estate at 8:00am on Sunday to find a number of small gazeboes and tents blown away or damaged and we realised it was impossible to launch in such winds.

 

the mass launch was again postponed with us just hoping the winds would soon pass and allow us to launch. – unforutnately this never happened and even when we finally gave in, packed and started to leave at 4pm the winds were still around gusting to around 40-50mph

 

Even though the weather was bad for rockets the show was still really enjoyable and we were kept fairly busy on the stand talking to the public and helping the children build a few rockets in the workshop area.

 

On Sunday I managed to get away from the stand for a while to have a look around the show to take a few photos. It was quite a shock to see so many Morris Minor cars and we estimated that there was at least 700 of them parks in rows as well as many others dotted around the estate.

 

 

But for me there was also a small static display of Birds of Prey, I spent around 30mins talking to the falconer and even held a few of the birds but I was really happy when the blue skies came out and I managed to get some nice shots of the Hawks and Owls with a bright blue sky background, I enjoyed getting close portraits of the birds and some are posted below.

 

Pete

 

 

~ by hartrockets on June 23, 2008.