Greetings all,
Yesterday was closing day for the 2022-23 season, next Saturday is opening day for the 2023-24 season, and so it goes on. Isn’t radio sailing marvellous, no waiting for the winter to pass like big boats do. Yesterday had lovely sailing conditions with a light to moderate NE wind, which I must say had a few holes in it, tsk tsk. Ralph Biggs was RO and I was assistant, Ralph set a 2 lap course which seemed to favour the early Mark Foy starters, so after 2 heats he increased it to 3 laps. Strangely enough the results stayed much the same, and we dare not increase it to 4 laps because experience has told us most sailors can’t count to 4, of course your Race Committee would have had no problem coping with 4 laps, why, because we had a very technical solution by counting off each lap on our white board. Behaviour again was good but there were several pile ups at the windward mark, mostly due to boats taking too fine a lay line. I suggest we all watch Polly’s windward mark roundings, no fine lay lines there, he leaves plenty of space and sails round the mark at top speed. Three of the boats sailing were given different MF start numbers than those on the computer, they are: J 371 – 20secs, J 377 – 40 secs, L 258 – 20 secs. Now a word and example about the importance of boat tuning. You will see in the results that J 153 had indifferent results for the first 5 heats, so after a quick retune up sailed away to a handsome win in heat 6, well done Selwyn. Another exciting facet of the racing was the very close racing between J 371 and J 258, it was like watching Americas Cup. Congratulations to the podium finishers; Nick, Roy and Derek.
Before we had our racing there was the first session of “different boats”, we had a couple of small yachts, ex Keith Lords big sailor cruiser, which sailed very well, a J and a couple of steam boats, unfortunately no vane yachts participated, but no one was sunk or damaged.