Sunday 30 January 2011

30th Jan 2011

Well I wasn't going to bother, the forecast said 5mph max, the trees and bushes in my garden said nothing at all*, and the crew rang up to say he wasn't interested in drifting.

Then shortly after 10am Gordon rang up and I was reminded that I had offered to crew for him if he couldn't get anyone else, and there he was standing on the shore with a boat and no crew. So I put the kit in the bag, bade a hasty farewell to the fambly and zoomed off. The usual time dilation occurred, so by the time I was changed and had found my locker key and made my way to the boat, it was 10:50am and by the way the start is at 'B'. But there was a bit of wind and Gordon had rigged the entire boat and put it in the water and was even wearing the crew's uniform, so feeling something akin to royalty I leapt aboard and started issuing orders.

We made it to the start with whole minutes to spare. I won't bore you with the actual race, suffice to say that Mr Anthony put a move on me which sent us off to the wrong side of the beat and we lost out, and then we went to the wrong side of the run in a desperate catch-up move and lost out even more. But it was good tactical racing and good fun to boot. And whilst I could have been hooning around in the 49er (if I'd remembered to bring the sails and foils) I doubt it would ever have been as interesting as doing the tactical racing thing with the rest of the fleet**.

Anyhoo, the wind dropped at lunchtime, and whilst we started the 2nd race, we all decided that the millpond conditions were just too light to continue past OL. But that was genuinely no wind at all, burgee going round and round type stuff. Anything above that was OK and really not as ghastly as you might have thought. So I'm now looking forward to next Sunday with renewed enthusiasm.

Many thanks to Gordon for donating the boat and the general get-up-and-go.



* They lie to us you know. Don't trust 'em.

** One of these days I will give it a try and find out 

Monday 17 January 2011

17 Jan 2011

Well the fleet is gradually reassembling itself after the big freeze. The big attraction this Sunday was the temperature, which I think made it into double figures and didn't have a minus sign in front of it either. But the wind was looking a bit troublesome on WindGuru, and it turned up in big lumps on the lake which made life a bit tricky.

First up for team Deano and Poorly Paul was to change the wheel on the trolley, thereby making launching a whole lot easier. Then zoom out to the start and it didn't seem too bad until the jib made a funny noise and started trying to climb down the forestay. I rapidly deduced that the string holding it up had come untied, so we retreated to a sandy bay to re-tie it. Then we re-launched and hacked back up to the committee boat just in time to miss the start. Well OK, we like a challenge. However, on the next tack the port jib sheet promptly shredded itself, so we were unable to really get in the groove upwind. I was also distracted by the view of the diy repair on the leech of the mainsail coming gradually adrift.

Still, we did manage to overtake everybody apart from Peter and Mike up the first beat, and then got the latter pair by virtue of a bit of kite flying across to E, but they rapidly overtook us again and went on to achieve a pretty huge lead. In the end we bailed out at the 3rd time round OL, me having too much water in my ears, eyes and drysuit to be able to work out if we had finished or not. As it happened, we hadn't, and we could have overtaken Peter and Mike on the last lap if we'd done it and stayed upright, as they had a couple of prolonged swims. But I figured I'd had quite enough fun for one day, so we put the boat away and went for lunch.

Next week, maybe warm and not stupidly windy ?