First we have to pay homage to Ross Wood.  Without Ross' tireless efforts, rallying would probably grind to a standstill in Canada.

This awesome photo by Sylvain shows grandpa Ross hard at work hauling rocks from the Black Bear Rally roads.  I'm told that, shortly after this photo was snapped, Ross with just one hand twirled that boulder on the end of its chain over his head and launched the rock whistling into the next county.  Oh ya, and I've heard that Ross has a pet blue ox, named Babe...


photo by Sylvain Erickson

Despite the best efforts of Ross and his crew, portions of the awesome Birch Lake and Qwirk stages, and the infamous Peanut, were so rough that we actually bent a strut and seized it solid during recce!

Luckily Martin is adept at changing struts, as this isn't the first time this has happened.  It was a little awkward though as we had no service crew with us this weekend.



All that's required is a big hammer and vice-grips.

We're really not confident on the Moccasin Lake stage, A1 & A2. The notes don't flow well for us, the road is really tricky and inconsistent, and we've just never felt comfortable on this stage.

I'm sure we could have been quicker, but we're not the slowest.

We were very disappointed to see Sylvain Vincent out on just the first stage.  We were looking forward to a good battle with him.  And Peter Kocandrle was forced to retire after these first two stages with a broken transmission.  So both of our two biggest competitors were eliminated after just the first couple of stages.

A1 - Moccasin Lake 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUtaK4k1RW0
A2 - Moccasin Lake 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M3Bp4Xpklc

Another service break, then the long loop of Qwirk South, The Peanut again, and Qwirk North.

These are the good ones!  Martin loves these long rough stages.

We had our only near-off of the rally on A6-Qwirk South.  At about 9:50 into the video, 17:53:24 on our clock display, I get thrown off by a questionable note.

"30 R6 short over Crest...", that's still obvious and okay.

"... into L6,  50 L6 over Jump continues over Crest"  I didn't see that first L6 at all.  That made me really slow for the L6/Jmp and the bit that continues over the crest.  I'm reading those way too late as we're already going over them.

Martin knows I'm off because at 10:10, or 17:53:45 on the clock, he prompts me to speed up with a "Crest?" that he sees coming up which I haven't called yet.

So the following "R4 long" after that catches him by surprise and we nearly fall off the road there.  Alan Ryall and Bruce Leonard, running a minute behind us on the road, later both commented on noticing the interesting lines we left in the gravel at that turn.

A6 - Qwirk South http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rshc3W5BCH4

On the second running of the Peanut, Martin dialed the pace up another notch.  At 3:57 into the video, 18:23:16 on the clock, we come to a "L6+/Cr ruf down 200".  The road barely turns left a tiny bit over that crest, but because the road drops steep downhill for a long way after that crest, it's completely blind when approaching the crest.  We usually, but not this time, go a bit more carefully over that crest, especially since at the bottom of the following rough downhill section is where the logging operations stack piles of logs on either side of the road.

This time Martin hardly lifted at all!  I was in the middle of turning the page in my notes as the car got light over the crest and then came down HARD into the downhill rough stuff.  That kinda surprised me, eh.

A7 - The Peanut 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAgtgxWJCek

Finally everything clicked perfectly on the the last stage A8 - Qwirk North.  We absolutely scorched through that stage!  We were both full-on confident in the way this one flowed.

Sadly the pounding delivered to the car managed to knock the connection loose betweent the bulletcam and the video recorder.  We lost video for the last minute of the stage.  But the audio recording is still good.

Listen to this one and you can tell we were feeling pretty pleased with our performance at the end of this stage!

A8 - Qwirk North  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEPx8sKJ9hY

Bruce VA3BRS wrote on 06/21/11 at 19:33:39:

Upload the photo to an online account like Photobucket.  Then paste the URL to the photo between 'img' tags like this, example for the photo of Ross.

Code:

 [img]http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c399/BmX5S/BBR%202011/RossWood.jpg[/img] 

I have to jump in here so that Sylvain gets credit, too!

Jim was helping with road work on Friday and Saturday, and Ross had some great stories about huge rocks that weren't about to defeat Sylvain.

I think Ross and Sylvain deserve huge credit!! Without their efforts, it's safe to assume that more cars would have suffered damaged bits and pieces.

The road crew rocks! (pun intended)

Jeannie

Bruce VA3BRS wrote on 06/22/11 at 20:21:24:

Wow!

Next time I'll make sure to keep my window closed.