New beginnings

It's been a while since I have written anything on this blog, the last entry was looking at what to look for in a sailing club. Since then I have indeed sold my beloved Wild Goose (E20202) to my eldest daughter who will sail her at Tynemouth Sailing club. I have also purchased an Albacore, 6812 which we have named 'Acushla'  and so far she is proving to be everything we hoped for: plenty of room, fast and interesting to sail (the Albacore is described as a 'technical' boat). Our first race at Ripon  saw us win the handicap race by a healthy time margin, I'm sure some of that is down to being the quickest boat and with a good start it meant we got clean away and sailed in clear air, which makes a massive difference.
On the club front we have had a rethink because the nearest clubs really don't offer a good programme of racing and our work commitments mean that we would not really make good use of the boat. So we widened our search and included inland clubs (we really would prefer to sail on the sea but there are not enough clubs on the coast in our area). We discovered a club that offered a really good programme that suits us just right and its no more than a 35 minute journey from our new home. The East Lancs sailing club sails on a fairly decent sized reservoir and races on Wednesday evenings, Saturdays and Sunday afternoons which means we could quite probably race 3 times a week which is way more than I expected. I'm sure we won't manage that every week but I would hope that we would manage at least the Wednesday evenings and one of the weekend days. So last week I sent of the application for membership and hopefully we will be sailing there within the month.
My crew will be my wife, Sally, who admits to being inexperienced in racing so one of our challenges is to get her up to speed in crewing and develop a good team work together s that we can really get Acushla going quick.
So I plan to do a few blog posts over the next few weeks or so on what a crew needs to know to make a boat go quick.