Hey, CJs, I want to thank everyone who helped with the Culpeper show on Nov 3rd & 4th.
It was a pleasure going on that journey with Anthony Lasky, Kelly Boyce, Kevin Pool & Dave O’Donald. They contributed tons of product (which means $$$) and time for several months to make this happen.
I also want to thank all the people who worked extra hard on setting up the show.
· I’m sure there’s a few I will probably miss, but let’s start with Kira Edwards, Justin Barnes, Kevin White, Mark Foster, Brian Lang, and also Bob & Joe (who came out as guests to support us). You guys put in a lot of time, and we thank you for that.
· Huge thanks to Tim Jameson and his IPC Crew who loaned us racks and more importantly helped us set up those racks. Tim, sorry some of your racks got blown up! We owe ya big time!
· Also, Marshall from Marshall Pyrotechnics, for loaning us the single shot holders and dropping them off for us ahead of time. We really appreciate the help, guys.
· Maziar Momeni, thanks for lending us your mods and 1.75 racks. Sorry we burnt up your mod…but we’ll help replace that for you
· A special thanks to the Inskeeps for digging holes, providing water and helping with the fires! And the Cedar Mountain 4-H folks for the food and everything else we needed. Our hosts are always great to us, and we really appreciate them.
I wanted to put this show together for all of us, and you guys worked harder than I intended. I can’t express how much I appreciate that.
We learned a few things along the way (double check your shipments before the day you drop them on the field, lift your mods off the ground for better signal, make sure you do that last minute continuity check), but mostly I learned I need to leave myself time to run proper system checks. I’m sure you didn’t notice but the show didn’t go as planned. I feel really bad about that, and I apologize to everyone who worked so hard to pull this off. We needed another day to finish setting things up properly and account for the shipment of wrong products.
The entire left cake position didn’t fire, 99% of the 5" & 6" shells didn’t fire, over 80 4" shells didn’t fire, and about 30 3" as well. The comets and mines weren’t finished being set to the proper angles, so that was a little sloppy. And because we didn’t have enough time to check, we had poor signal and continuity issues. Then there were the ground fires which caused a lot of smoking out of effects. Some parts of the script worked ok but there was a lot of dead sky because shells just weren't going off. Overall, the show was ok, but I put the show in my failure box because I didn’t deliver what was designed. And it was a really grand show in the simulation! Any one of those things could make for a bad show, but boy getting all of those together definitely felt terrible. But it wasn’t all bad!
· Kevin’s ground salutes were awesome as always, catching people off guard (their intended purpose).
· Dave’s gas mines worked very well, thank you for that.
· Mark Foster, you did great hooking up those 10-12" shells, every one of those went off. Sorry for smoking some of the nice big shells out, will try to prevent that next year. Also thanks for the great video and commentary “Now that’s a fire!!”
· Kelly, you had some awesome salutes, buddy! And the lampares, the ultras, the 10-12 " shells were fantastic!
So, with that said, we plan to do another show in 2024, especially since we have so many great shells that didn’t go off (I think only 2 of the 5-6” shells went off - lol) The show will be better planned so we won’t need to work so hard during those 2 days. And I really want everyone to have fun doing this and not work all day. It's always a pleasure working with you guys. I would work with any of you any time, anywhere.... Have no fear, we will prevail!!! Happy Holidays to all and see you next year!!
Secretary
Anthony Bova