I went out with Virginia to retrieve Dave from a field near a town called Kikinda. It took us two hours to cross the border into Serbia and one and a half hours to cross back into Hungary. The GPS has no database for Serbia and refuses to accept coordinates for areas that are not covered by its database - stupid. The only map we had was the contest aviation chart. The roads are terrible, sometimes just ending in a field, the road signs are mostly in Cyrillic and we couldn't find anybody who spoke English or German. Nevertheless, we found Dave around midnight and de-rigged the ASW-27 in record time while the mosquitoes tried to suck us dry. Fortunately, Dave had made a very retrieve friendly landing close to a "major" road. This morning at the Team Captains' meeting I heard horror stories of gliders still being stuck in muddy fields that are inaccessible by car.
By 3:30 this morning we were back in the hotel.
One of the more interesting experiences was with a police man, who flagged us down, talked to us in Serbian and got into the car with us. After about 50 km, he said "stop here - thanks" and jumped out. Later we learned that hitchhiking is the routine way of commuting for police officers in this part of Serbia.
Leaving the EU territory for the Republic of Serbia
About two hours after arriving at the border to Serbia we are all set to go againJerzy who had landed out in Hungary about 50 km from Szeged was retrieved by Maria and George.
From a scoring perspective the day was quite successful for the Canadian Team:
Jerzy placed 9th for the day with 933 points which puts him into 6th place out of 51 in the overall score, up one place from the day before.
Dave placed 19th for the day with 916 points which improves his overall score by 4 places to 31st out of 49.
Both results are still preliminary since particularly in 15m, ten contestants have not been scored yet.
Due to the mass land-out of 15m in Serbia and the late returns, they have declared a rest day for 15m on Monday.
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