Neck in neck...

In the free-style sky-flight finals, Team Ring-billed Gull and Team Herring Gull were in rare form.  The twists, turns, screams and aerial maneuvers had everyone in the stadium out of their seats.  Herman Herring of Team HG, in his first ever AOGs gave a breathtaking performance, barely beating out his two competitors from Team Ring-bill, Ruby and daughter Reba.  

After covering the morning events, I headed out to have lunch with some friends - it seems that I'd worked up an appetite!  

After lunch, I returned to the venue to watch Team Ring-billed Gull compete in the Giant Sky Slalom Team event (see Extra).  The team was a little disorganized at several points, probably a result of one of the other teams flying by with a french fry (chip).  You'd think they'd have better discipline than that, but you'd be wrong.  All it takes is a glimpse of a fry/chip and months of training goes right out the window.

After covering the afternoon events, I went to start up my car ...and  got a very unpleasant grunting noise.  Luckily, Hubs was home and I was only a few miles away.  My Prince Charming to the rescue for the second time in a week.  Seems that my battery was dying, so after charging it enough to get home, he stopped and got a battery which is now installed.  I'm ready for just about anything now.  (And I love you to the moon and back, babe.)

Carry on with all the great reporting on the 2018 AOGs!

xo
Debbi

A comment on this shot.  I shot everything this morning in RAW on the rental D500 and it seemed to me that all the shots were very soft.  I have to return the camera tomorrow but first I'm going to take some test shots in both JPEG and RAW and see if I get the same result.  If you enlarge this photo, you will see quite a lot of noise.