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7 Days of a desperate struggling ( by Ei-ichi Yamaguchi, a member of the meteorologic team )
The 2006 Saga International Hot-air Balloon Fiesta is over. I hope all the balloonists are already preparing for the next year competitions. Some of you may think that we, members of the meteorological team, didn't have a single day of a hard time. Let me tell you how we struggled during the five days.
As you know there are five days of competitions but we have two more days for the pilots to practice befroe the competitions start.
The two days are also days for us to practice the pilot-balloon observation.
Students of Saga University tackled their job eagerly in observing the weather conditions with us staff members.
On the previous day of the competitions we set an anemoscope / anemometer on top of the broadcasting tower.
However, it turned out that it did not work well during the competitions. As a result we troubled the engineers about tuning it all right.
Another trouble with us was that our computer could not be connected to the internet. We, the meteorological team, have to gather a lot of information about the weather by means of a computer. It was a fatal damage to us indeed.
What we did was that on each day a member goes back to his own house to collect and copy necessary information by his own computer. It is not clear why we could not make an access to the intenet.
We borrowed a device to observe a pilot balloon from the Japan Balloon Federation, but it did not work well for some time. So we borrowed another but it also was a defective machine. We were quite at a loss what to do. However after a lot of trial and error we finally became able to read the angles of elevation and horizon with the device. In this way for the latter part of the competitions we could make a correct observation with it.
The last day of the competitions was a day when we felt very uneasy, because we almost ran out of the red rubber balloon by which to observe the direction of the wind. We inflate this rubber balloon with helium in order to raise it up 100 meters in a minute. It is a special balloon and it takes long to obtain from the company.
Therefore, we had to be very careful not to lose it. Fortunately we could collect necessary data for the Key Grab Race on the last day by raising the pilot balloon, and all of us felt really relieved.
[Written by]
Ei-ichi Yamaguchi, a member of the meteorologic team
2006.11.08
