Royal Lymington Yacht Club Champion of Champions Event
by Stuart Jardine 16 Oct 2014 10:46 BST
11 October 2014
Royal Lymington Yacht Club Champion of Champions Event © Doug Rogerson
The XOD Division has been offering their boats for this event for a few years now and once again they had 10 boats available in racing trim with either an owner or his representative aboard, to be joined by 2 club members selected to represent the other classes raced at the club; from Lymington River Scows to Class 1 & 2 IRC.
There was a slight problem earlier in the week when the club's crane gave up the ghost. Fortunately the X Class Wednesday race was cancelled due to bad weather and many of the Divisional members rallied around to help scrub the boats by hand. Our thanks certainly go out to them all and especially Simon McCarthy who donned his wet suit to ensure all the difficult sections were thoroughly scrubbed. A very necessary task to ensure all the boats were equally competitive! Here our thoroughly deserved thanks must go to the Club Boatmen for the immense help they all gave to ensure success.
Saturday morning once out on the water, the weather looked ominous to everyone with a light and very unstable wind pattern and large thunder storms all around plus a spectacular rainbow along the North shoreline.
However as the time limit for racing approached and the Race Team were preparing to hoist the Abandoned Racing Flag, with little more than 10 seconds to spare, a 5 knot North West wind was observed from the Committee Boat, A last minute decision was made to get in one race, there was a quick U-turn by the Race Team and the race sequence commenced.
Five minutes later a successful race was started and one lap and finish at the Windward mark on the second lap, saw Rory Paton (Lym. Scow) take the gun followed by David Alan-Williams (Class 2 Dinghies) and Kevin Podger (Class 3 Lym. Handicap), much to the relief of everyone out on the water.