Hamble River Sailing Club Wednesday Night Series 'Bottle Pursuit'

The leading XOD during the Hamble River Wednesday Night Series 'Bottle Pursuit' © Malcom Donald

The leading XOD during the Hamble River Wednesday Night Series 'Bottle Pursuit' © Malcom Donald

Last night saw the Bottle Pursuit Race take place before the "B" Series starts next Wednesday. Hamble River Sailing Club Secretary Malcolm Donald took control as Race Officer. With a SW wind at a pleasant 8 to 10 knots the RO sent the fleet down to Royal Southern with successive windward leeward loops of hamblewinterseries.com and William with a fetch to Coronation, a beat to Stormforce and a final leg to Coronation to finish.

With the tide running out participants rightly were wary of being over the line but individual OCS was carefully avoided even by Sunbow II (Andrew Quickie) who has had a run of OCS starts the last few weeks. There was a distinct absence of XODs this week although the crew of XOD Satu were spotted crewing on Passion (Paul Jones), the largest competitor last night. This kept the first start relatively uncrowded although Class 2 managed to have some six boats including the Impalas on a simultaneous start.

X108 Leading Wind (Hamish Calder) lived up to its name leading the fleet round the course and the intensive concentration of boats on the set of windward leeward loops gave the race committee interesting viewing. Starfall (Adrian Hull) demonstrated two textbook spinnaker drops at each leeward rounding. Forethought of Gosport sailed by its owner Mike James made one wonder why crew were required as he went round single handed with seemingly little effort. Peter Smith showed how to make a tight rounding despite the strong ebb tide with an early turn into the leeward mark on Needlework but wily Peter Nicholson in X77 Sunshine was the only smaller boat to round the leeward mark and then tack to get to the windward side of the fleet on the next beat to avoid the dirty air. Crew on various boats also showed a range of talents. Ken on Needlework went through impressive acrobatics bringing in the main sheet on the leeward mark and then hitting the rail a foredeck to skirt the jib immediately after. Passion gave their spinnaker an early wash on the first drop and nearly repeated the escapade on the second drop although they gave a fine demonstration of kite reaching coming down to Coronation later which clearly paid off.

All credit to the Race Officer as the finish showed a fairly tight tussle between the fleets. The new sails on X108 clearly did the job and Leading Wind retained her lead right into the finish. Needlework in Class 2 just took second place from Passion Class 1 who took a number of boats on her last two legs to grab third overall with a number of Class 3 boats hard on her heels.

Next week is the first of the "B" Series which is broken up by the Cowes Week pursuit race followed the following week by the B series. Wednesday night racing is free and only available to members but all new comers are invited to come and try an evening for free. Those looking to crew do contact the office and it has been great to see a number of new crew who recently have joined the Club. Full details on the Hamble River SC website so come and break up the week with a dose of sea air each Wednesday evening until the clocks change. All new boats are invited to join the fleet back in the Clubhouse for supper afterwards and those members with boats who haven't made it out on the water yet - get your friends together for a fun race.