The site was fairly compact. Starting along the access road, there was the public viewing field, a private residence, the camping area, another private residence, and then the class C sales and shoot area. The Class C area was on one corner of a huge potato field, with the rocket guys shooting area and the magazine both located waaaay out in the middle of the field. The parking area for the PGI crowd was right across the road from Class C. As you walked back from the road through the camping area, you came to several buildings, one of which was serving food all week (courtesy of the Lions Club who own and maintain the park), and another which was used for seminars. There was also a huge tent which was used for seminars and afterglows. Beyond that were the PGI viewing bleachers at the back of a beach and a small lake. The Class B line was on the right of the lake, and the public display area was in a ball field on the left of the lake. Product demos were shot from the left shore of the lake and from the far shore of the lake. All in all a nice setup, with everything within a few minutes walk of my camp site.
Sunday night opened up with a short loud show by the WPAG, choreographed to the Star Spangled banner, followed by a bigger show by the Bartolottas. The WPAG show featured lots of noise! The "rockets red glare and bombs bursting in air" were represented by a flight of red strobe (!) rockets and a volley of lampare shells. The end of that section featured several volleys of 20-30 salutes, and culminated in a string of 35 two pound ground bombs spread along the back of the lake. The Bartolotta show was big, beautiful, and loud, as expected. It also contained (if I remember correctly) a number of lampare shells. After the shows, there was open shooting until the wee hours, after which we staggered off to bed.
Back to the site for Product demos, competition, and open shooting.
Between 5 and 6 pm people were invited to walk out to the magazine and look at some of the items that the Russians would be shooting on Thursday. They had a 12" shell, a 6"shell, and several smaller items on display. The shells were ball shells, constructed using multiple concentric layers of cardboard hemispheres (7 layers for the 12", 3 layers for the 6 inch, if we were communicating correctly). They had two electric matches directly in the lift - there was no provision for hand firing. The shells were painted robins-egg blue with stencilled on identifying information - in Russian of course. They looked like sub-hunting mines! The Russians were quite friendly, but none of the pyros spoke any english, and their interpreter didn't really speak pyro, although she got better at communicating pyro concepts as the week went on. I'll talk about their show when I get to Thursday.
Tuesday evening featured product demos of Class C cakes from Flower Basket in China (very nice!) and Class B cakes from Golden Pheonix (??). I'm not sure of the name on the class B cakes - I've developed a mental block - they were probably the most boring fireworks I've ever seen. What earthly use could you find for a 600 shot cake, with every tube the same? We were all left wondering what the intended use of these monsters was, and being very glad that we were not stuck with a container load of them! After that was competition and more open B shooting. I'm not talking about the competitions in detail for two reasons. One, I didn't take notes, and two, the schedule I have in front of me does not list which competitions were which night.... I'll mention a few highlights here and there as I think of them.
One competition item I won't forget was Bill Lyman's entry in best large gerb. These were a pair of 3" gerbs with a dozen or more effects, which ended up performing as "Gerbe Mortes"! One loud bang, and a four foot hole in the ground! I heard Bill talking about them later, and he said that he had done them as a 2" gerb very successfully, so he thought a 3" was just what he needed. He told Clive Jennings-White about them, and Clives comment was "Different physics problem here...". So Bill knew they might have a problem. He warned Jim Freeman of this, and Jim told him not to light the second one if the first blew. This was overridden on site by Mark Buda, who decided based on crowd reaction that we'd enjoy seeing another, because we got to see the second perform exactly the same as the first. Tom Archer, who was one of the judges, said he gave Bill one-half point for the first for humor value, and a whole point on the second for consistancy!
The next session was the BATF session, with Bob Mosely as the main speaker. Bob is the head of the section of the BATF that deals with explosives, and his talk was very interesting and encouraging. He started out by saying that if you started taking things away from the fourth of July, that the last he would want to see go would be the flag and the fireworks. He is personally pro-pyro, and believes that now is the time to try to achieve some separation between explosives regulation and fireworks regulation.
An interesting point came up with regard to the re-classification of flash powder as a high explosive. Several people pointed out (myself incuded) that this particular regulation would cause a lot of trouble in achieving the separation of pyro from HE. Ken Kosanke then pointed out that he had used the Freedom of Information Act to request the basis for the regulatory change. The one report that was supplied in response to the request (and a second request, because he couldn't believe that that was all there was) was quite ambivalent about whether detonation had indeed been observed in flash powder. Ken then contacted the author of his report, who was (according to Ken) quite emphatic that using his report as the reason to re-classify flash was scientifically unsound and that he did not agree with the re-classification. This certainly needs to be followed up on!
After dinner, we did the class C tent again, and I had a lot of fun with my nephew, who really loves pyro, but had never seen any fireworks for sale before (we're both from New York, where _everything_ is illegal, even sparklers). Talk about going from zero to the ultimate in one step!
The product demos Wednesday night were fabulous! Tom DeWille started things off with an exquisite small scale show tightly choreographed to "The Music of the Night" from Phantom of the Opera. Talk about precision! Hop Kee followed this up with their usual fantastic show of their products.
The last product demo of the evening was by Rozzi, and I have to say that this was one of the best fireworks displays I have ever seen. The colors were simply fantastic (how do they get those incredible, super-saturated colors?), the choreography was tight and well planned, and the selection of material magnificent. All in all, it was one of the high points of the week for me. When I win the lottery, I'm hiring them for my celebration!
We then went into competition. One of the Movie Special Effects entries, by Pinky, was a simulated beach invasion, which featured a real mobile howitzer as a prop! I asked Pinky later, and he said that was complete serendipity - he arrived at the convention with the effect all planned and there was the gun! So he asked the National Guard folks if he could use it, and they said sure...
Rockets had been a problem all week, due to many of them blowing at launch (high humidity??). Because there was a row of trees between the stands and the rocket launch area, it resulted in what one person called "the best rocket competition I never saw". Wednesday night things improved, and we saw some of the level IV rockets achieve absolutely unreal altitudes. Best wheel was also shot on Wednesday, and a really classic devils wheel sticks in my mind. The last report on the wheel was just a soft pop, and just as the whole crowd was saying "awwwww..." the REAL salute went off, catching us all by surprise. A very clever ending to a very nice wheel.
The real crowd pleaser, though, was the last competition of the night, the girandolas. There were only three entries. The first lifted off, but then lost balance and crashed. The second started off OK, but then went into a rather spectacular disintegration. Jim Freeman was announcing the competition, and had always announced his (prize-winning) entries as "Our last contestant was Jim Freeman of....". This one just got a rather crest- fallen "That one was mine". The last girandola made it all worth waiting for. It was four feet in diameter, had 52 drivers, and a huge load of effects. It all worked fine, rising majestically into the air, spewing effects in all directions. A real crowd pleaser. I'm glad to see this new category in the competitions, and hope we'll see a lot more next year.
Again, I want to say that my competition coverage is very spotty, due to my leaky memory and no notes. I really hope that you don't feel left out if I don't mention your entry, I really enjoyed them all!
More open shooting and the Product demos. Garry Hansen showed off both on his own behalf (Precocious Pyrotechnics) and Mantsuna. Impressive stuff to show, too! Then came the show we'd all been waiting for - the Russians!
They did about a ten minute show which went all the way from roman candles to 12" shells. The first part was done to music - a very curious blend of Russian ethnic music and Russian knock-offs of pop and country-western(!) music, including the Beatles "Back in the USSR". The show was great, and featured some colors and effects that were new, at least to me. They had some very nice yellows, and a truly fine aqua. This aqua was used for a number of double-petal chrysamthemum shells in which the inner petal consisted of little tiny stars and the outer petal of much bigger stars. A neat trick which I had not seen before. They are not much into noise, and even their shells listed as "with triple load report" were _very_ mild by PGI standards. They got a very loud and long round of applause after their show.
This was followed by a large demo by Independence which featured many large caliber shells and a seemingly endless series of salutes at the end. After their show, open B was opened back up for the remainder of the night. This was the last open shooting, so everyone hustled to get their shells shot, including those who had built shells in the hands-on seminar. I remember what a thrill it was for me at the Weedsport convention when I shot the first shell I had ever made!
A very informative electric firing session followed. One thing that was very interesting was the only first hand story I have heard of an electric display apparently being set off by CB radios. All in all, I came away less convinced than ever that electric firing is significantly safer than hand firing.
About noon, the sky went very quickly black and it became apparent that we were in for quite a storm. A lot of the set pieces for the public display were already set up, and we had to really scurry to get stuff under cover. The storm blew over by about 2:00, and all of the stuff came back out.
I skipped the banquet, so I don't know who won what awards, although I did find out that Jim Freeman won grand master for the umpteenth time - Jim, you're just too good! Class C vending opened back up (but no shooting), and everyone used this last chance to stock up on goodies and chemicals.
Then came the public show. All of the set pieces, including the mega-string, were set up for best viewing by the public. This meant that they were off to the left hand end of the PGI bleachers. I wanted to see the wheels and things, so I elected to sit in the section reserved for PGI in front of the public, and parallel to the mega-string. This was a great place to watch the show from, but you could not hear the narration at all due to the speakers being down on the beach in front of the bleachers. I later found out that the narration and music were broadcast on the radio, but this was not communicated to us at all. Sigh.
The mega-string consisted of a 1/2 million cracker string of conventional contruction, followed by the "wall" of 300 Horse Brand 20' celebration strings. Rutger Webb did a superb job of directing the set-up, and it performed flawlessly. The attention to detail even included being able to drop the entire superstructure to the ground within minutes after the string finished, so as not to obstruct the view. The safety team wet it all down afterwards, but that was almost not needed. It burned out more completely than any string I can remember. The breeze was blowing towards us, and we got buried in red paper! Fortunately there was enough updraft to lift the smoke over us.
The show itself was shot in two segments - the ground works first and then the aerial segment. There were some small trees which obscured some of the lance work, and some star projectors were a little - um - enthusiastic - and shot stars into the PGI spectators, but on the whole the ground portion was very nice. Some of the wheels didn't function 100%, but that may have been storm damage. A flight of 3 girandolas were real crowd pleasers.
Then, after what seemed an interminable break (people were getting a little antsy as a rather spectacular thunder and lightning storm was brewing north of us and seemed to be getting closer) the aerial segment began. What can I say. Fantastic. The shells were magnificent, and the pacing was varied enough to keep us really on our toes. There would be a slow segment followed by a volley of what seemed like hundreds of shells. They would paint the sky with dozens of the same shell in all different sizes. I'm sure many people thought the finale was starting at several points in the show. When the finale did start, it was like someone had turned on a gigantic firehose of fire. The shells were coming up so fast that the lift noise blended into a continuous roar.
Till next year ---- See you in Muskegon!!!!