First flight at the First Annual Bama Blastoff, held at the D River Ranch in north west Alabama.  Beautiful field, beautiful country, really nice landowners who pretty much spent the entire weekend out at the field, feeding folks and overall just being friendly to everyone.  Winds were a little stronger than I was hoping for, but with the size of the filed I was still confident in the flight and recovery.  After a couple of sputters, the motor roared to life and the rocket climbed away on a big loud white flame.  Rocket arced over into the wind pretty good after motor burnout and was travelling horizontally at ejection.  I had a very hard time tracking it visually after the apogee event, although multiple people saw it all the way down, and I had a strong signal from the tracker.  After it was down I got a line from several folks that saw it and swore it was on the primary field.  That was around 1000 am.  I spent the rest of the day hiking the fields and looking for that rocket.  I figured out fairly early that the tracked had probably stripped from the shock cord and come down separately since it was much farther away than the where the rocket had been seen.  I even tried tracking down the tracker signal, but found myself blocked out by a large gully/stream that I couldn't find my way around.  I eventually made my way back to the range and asked the landowner how to get into the field where the tracker signal came from.  His son promptly loaded me up in his truck and we ran over to the field in question while stopping at several high points along the way to "glass" for my rocket in various fields.  I was able to locate the tracker (1"x1"x2" black plastic box) in the middle of a corn stubble field. and since it was getting late we headed back to the range.  I headed back to the hotel and before I got there I got a call from Chris Short saying he had my rocket in his truck.  The landowner's son had drawn a line from the range to where we had found the tracker and had driven out and found the rocket within about 20 minutes.  The drogue chute had taken some damage from what was obviously a high speed deployment at apogee, but everything else was in perfect condition.  Quite an adventure overall.