Thursday, May 22, 2014

The mid-week weekend race!

Another wonderful evening of racing, food, friends and beer (Of course! what else do you expect at a sailing club?)
This evening my crew was Graham Sim. Graham and I met through my work with the Bromsgrove and Redditch Methodist Circuit. We discovered a common interest in sailing and we finally got our act together and got racing this evening. Graham used to sail at Midland SC many years ago and I thing he enjoyed the visit to his old club.
The racing was good. winds light and from the north coming from over the dam wall which made the top half of the reservoir a no go area for racing, the winds get far to random. Our Race Officer set a good course, although those with spinnakers complained that the reaches were too close and I noted there were no dead runs ( a relatively good point of sailing for Albacores). But all things considered he did a fine job.
Once again a pursuit race and we started at 11 minutes and quickly passed the RS200 and one of the Enterprises. Graham was quickly getting to grips with the flyaway jib pole and the constant need to adjust the settings, by the end of the race he was getting back into the swing of sailing although he said he has a nice bruise shaping up. Boats are so unforgiving! Anyway, we soon had only 5 boats ahead of us and by the start of the penultimate lap just the remarkably quick Europe was ahead of us.


We chased hard and finished a few minutes behind; she was just too quick. This evening no curry but a jacket spud with cheese, beans and salad washed down with Hoping Hare ale. Excellent.


1 comment:

Doc Häagen-Dazs said...

Yeah! Windward/Leeward courses are best for pursuit races! Plenty of passing lanes!