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Highlights:
Having celebrity crew - Ken Cooper (a bit like having a sailmaker on board without the penalty). Nice GPS work, until the batteries gave out.
Downers:
No wind. No boatspeed. No distance on the others.
Result:
7th on PYR and 6th on Personal.
Lessons Learnt:
None at all.
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1st Spring Series - Medium Inshore. Friday 1st April
Wind 8-13 knots, South easterly, becoming 13 - 18 knots later.
It's been a while since we sailed. So it's good to be out on the water again, with a new series, with fresh hopes and aspirations. New sails and new website stickers on the boom. We're ready for anything, that's for sure. So I'm not worried that Andy's off skiing in Canada, and that we'll have a bit too much fun flying the Bitch without him. Nope. It's all going to be fine.
Silly me.
Ken joins us aboard as we're short handed, and we set off, raise the sails and cruise around the start in extremely light wind, hoping we can set the spinnaker to the first mark. We start on the Al Bander Port Poles transit, leaving Green & White beacon to Port heading for West Pole, but the wind (that was from North East), comes around South, so we're on a beat after all - in about 3 knots of wind. Just a tad late for the start, but only by seconds we crawl our way down to West Pole to join in a pile-up of boats all drifting onto the mark (a heavy fixed pole) in a strong tidal current. Kaos taks to Starboard first, followed by Touch & Go, and a chain reaction sees us and Yella Belly tack to avoid them as we're all only a metre apart.
It's hot and sluggish as we raise the spinnaker only to find there's not enough wind to fill the thing, so we inch our way to Pumphouse Port mark and round this in slightly more breeze - about 4 knots now - heading for Shoal Spar. The wind slowly begins to pick up, but we're on our third leg with only boat lengths between us and the others, when we should be miles ahead by now. Things are looking a bit dismal, but it's good to be out anyway.
A beat sees us gain a little but conditions are still very poor. The breeze is shifty and virtually non-existant at times. Still we can't shake the others, so we suffer for another downwind and only pull away when the breeze settles in at about 4.5 knots on our last beat to the finish transit.
At least we managed to cross the line first. Ken finally has a go on the helm, safely under engine, as we head back. He isn't silly enough to helm during the race, as he know's he'd be the reason for failure if he did! The result? Third last. Seventh. And there was me thinking that fourth place was ours by default.
After-match heckling at the Clubhouse provides light relief. Mike, with a perspective from waaaay back in the fleet insists we were overtaken by a Division 2 boat, when everyone knows it was (after a very long time) the other way round. Quite clearly and categorically. Just because it took us half an hour to do so.............
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