Tuesday, August 08, 2006

NWN Week part 2

Day 2 at 'Sunny Hunny' was a less dramatic affair with moderate wind conditions and two uneventful races with less that good results. I just didn't seem to be able to get it together and I made 2 silly mistakes that resulted in lost places. On both occasions what I should have done was tack on the lee bow of the other boat but I stupidly tried to cross thier bows and had to do a 720 on the last one. Jo is now under instructions to tell me to tack if we find ourselves in that situation again.

Day 3 was a good result (2nd) but sailing on the river Ooze at King's Lynn is not a pleasent experiance (the river name is a good indicator), we ended up with mud in the boat that was with us all week! Ugh!
The wind was over the town and this made it very gusty and at times the wind was non existant. The incomming tide was very strong and this made it very hard to make progress, especailly when the wind dropped!
The start was uptide and so as to keep out of the way we kept downtide and this was a big mistake because we were 100yds behind the line at our start gun! The Course was a figure of 8 with two bouys at either end of the town. The really problem mark was the second one because to round it you had to sail out into the tide, tack and sail past the mark against the flood. If the wind died, which it frequentlty did, you would drift backwards and boats behind you would round ahead of you! Now if they had made so that you rounded the other way it would be better because you could sail in to the shallows and make progress past the mark. You might still lose out to a boat rounding later with a nice gust but it would at least make it a little more fair.
However we gradually worked our way up the fleet and managed to finish 2nd only a matter of yards behind the winner so not to bad. At the prize giving we collected our first bottle of wine.

2 comments:

Tillerman said...

Well done. And how cool to win a bottle of wine instead of a useless trophy. I once won a turkey and have the wishbone mounted on a plaque as a reminder.

Tim Coleman said...

I guess I could have kept the bottle and turned into a lampshade or put a miniture Enterpise in it...

Nah