What another great day sailing at Victoria Lake!  Despite shades of Cyclone Vaianu seeming to be lashing the city, 18 brave sailors showed up to try their luck. Myself and Rodney Ford set a simple up-and-down course with an almost perfectly aligned start line. We ran 2 fleets 50 seconds apart, sorted by handicap and it worked pretty well. It sure made for some exciting meetings of the fleets and amazing reflexes were displayed during some of the high-speed encounters.

Overall there weren’t too many crashes, and as the day went on there were less and less, so well done sailors for getting the hang of it. G Raxworthy IOM-99 decided to make the most of the conditions with his IOM and definitely recorded top speed of the day down the back straight, but got caught out by flotsam a few times. Still got him on the podium.

The wind was roaring through the top of the willow trees, but not always across the water and reading the wind channels sure paid off. There were a few DNFs as the brutal sailing conditions tested the rigging and waterproofing (Roy…), but we got a full set of heats in and all the chocolate biscuits got eaten so all in all a good day.

Congratulations to podium finishers, commiserations to DNFs. Results are below.