Hell. I took my code test in January, 1979. I don't even remember the code anymore.
I got 115 Q's in the contest, and a claimed score of 23,458 points. I did get AK and HI and St/ Croix for my US contacts. Noise was hell here between S5 and S7. So many stations I knew i could pull out if I didn't have the damned noise. I was strictly on 15M. But, it's a way to pass away half of the holiday weekend.
Just especially for the contest, I built a K5RP antenna for 15 and mounted it for horizontal polarization. (So it looks like a vertical antenna) Never used one before. It seemed to work out okay. I made a few contacts. Next year I am gonna have a monster quad up 500 feet and a QRO amp driven by an FT-DX9000. Oh yeah. I'm dreaming.