Info:
:-D Manuel Schütz of Switzerland finally did it !! He increased the World Record in Long-Distance Boomerang Throwing to 155m on a tournament in Kloten, Switzerland, on June 7, 1998. The old record of 149.12m was held for almost 6 years by Michel Dufayard of France. Manuel already had a throw of 145m this spring in Luebbecke, Germany. He used a 3mm GFEC Megaquirl there, which he of course intended to use here in Kloten, our home territory. But during warm-up he lost his precious jewel. So he had to use his 2nd choice 3 mm Paxolin MegaQuirl Pathfinder instead, which is only a slight modification of the original Megaquirl ! What will happen if he finds his good GFEC Megaquirl again ?!?!

The tournament was organized by Tibor. The throwing field is located near the runways of Zurich Airport. The planes are quite close, closer than in Amsterdam, actually. There were two ld tournaments scheduled for this sunday, because our rules require 5 throws for a ld tournament. But Tibor wanted to have 10 throws. So he decided to run two separate competitions. The conditions were ideal during the first tournament: There was a steady breeze from the west, where there are no obstacles within several kilometers, with 2-3 Bft. Sometimes, however, there was turbulence from the landing airplanes... Manuel had two valid throws out of 5. One went to 155m and the other to 142m. He needs to throw his boom with a rather large aiming angle of up to maybe 10° (quite difficult to determine). Then the boomerang makes an astonishing long and stable diving movement, which takes the boomerang out to about 120m. It then begins to rise and turn around on a narrow curve high in the air. On its way back it dives almost to the ground and comes back low and with large speed over the baseline. It's an more or less out-and-back trajectory, but not a frisbee flightpattern !

To be honest: I had great difficulties to track the boom with the eye, it's so small and so far away ! Behind Manuel cam Uwe from Germany with 122m. He used a strange design, which looked like a question mark or a siccle, and it had an unbelievable strange flightpath. We want to mention also that there was quite a number of throwers crossing the 100 m mark, some of them for the first time.

At the beginnung of the second tournament the weather conditions worsened. First, heavy winds came up (about 7 Bft.) and it became almost impossible to have valid throws. Towards the end in began to rain and it was coming down in torrents. So there were no scores over 100m in the second tournament.

There are more news, concerning the distance measurment. You may have noticed that the results of our Kloten competition are given "only" in meters precision. This stems from the fact that we used a laser rangefinder (Bushnell YARDPRO 400), which has a precision of 1m, instead of a measuring tape to determine the distance. We have great confidence in this device, especially for long distances beyond 100m. The accuracy of measuring tapes is certainly in the same order of magnitude, if not worse, depending on the kind of tape you use. We tested this device on different ld tournaments already and it proved to be quick and reliable. So we decided to use it for our measurments and forget the annoying proceeding of measuring with a tape. And this has quite a few advantages ! First of all and most importantly, you know immediately what your distance was ! Furthermore, you don't need to place plugs in the ground and loose precious time. We are sure that the laser measuring method will establish soon in the ld community all over the planet.