4 Aug

Very good sailing indeed. Paul Roe kindly volunteered to crew, the wind entirely failed to disappear at 7pm as some suggested, and it was GOOOOOD!

The course was a motley collection of very short legs, mostly close reaches, and as we discovered, almost entirely useless if you wanted to fly your spinnaker. But the wind was glorious, coming and going in big lumps, and it was just perfect for the course. Any less wind and we'd have been plodding along the 2 sail reaches getting bored, any more and we'd have been properly overpowered and deeply unhappy. But as it was, it was great, with a lot of bearing away in the gusts and dumping flipping great armfuls of mainsheet. And there were usually a few upturned hulls to avoid at the gybe marks (of which there were 3).

In terms of actually racing, it was more of an assault course than a race course, the only way to overtake being to avoid making a mistake. This was most noticeable on the reach from X to K, which started life as a moderately broad 3 sail reach (the only one on the course) and morphed into a 'why the hell did we think the kite was a good idea?' leg, then a 'just about flyable' leg, then an Assie-drop at the end leg, and so on.

We had a good tussle with Tim Rush and Richard in Pete's boat, before they retired thinking they'd finished and we carried on (also thinking we'd finished, but up for another lap anyway).

Verdict, nice to see a bit more of the unseasonal windy stuff, and a distinctly mental course to go with it. Really good!