Thursday, April 23, 2009

Middle Nene SC open meeting


This weekend just gone, Jo and I trailed Goosy over to Middle Nene SC at Thrapston for a coaching day followed by an open meeting the next day.

As usual Mike Macnamara was on good form with some more excellent Coaching. It was good weather but quite windy with some big gusts. We spent more time on the recent rule changes this year and there are some interesting changes, Rule 18 being the one.

One thing that we need to do is to re-establish our routines - we were quite uncoordinated and this showed particularly in our tacking. We were also getting used to using the new fly-away job pole system and we are begining to develop a new procedure for that.

The open meeting was great fun; 20 boats on the start line and not much room. I had big problems trying to find a space in the start line and the best start I got was at the wrong end of the biased line and a bit late but with freedom to tack into clear air so even though I immediatly gave away several boat lengths to the leaders I was ahead of the pack simply because I had clear air and most others were dealing with the dirty air of the leaders. We finished a respectful 7th in that race. Overall we finished 10th with a 7th and 11th to count; our 12th place being our discard. It was a great weekend racing, very tiring, very enjoyable.

This weekend coming we are off to the National Masters Championships at Ogston SC. First time I've done this so it will be interesting.

No comments: