Lymington XOD fleet Wednesday Series Race 22
by Roy Froud 26 Sep 2015 12:12 BST
23 September 2015
The final race of the Wednesday series was sailed in a good SW 13 knot breeze which steadily increased throughout the race to gust up to 24 knots on a flooding tide to give excellent racing conditions over a good course set by the race officers.
The platform end was the favoured end to start and Stuart Jardine in X119 Lone Star followed closely by David da Cunha in X161 Mayday and Nik Froud in X72 Venus led the 13 boat fleet on the long inshore beat up to mark B Pennington.
Both Lone Star and Mayday over stood on the beat inshore allowing Rory Paton in X48 XL to tack early and make the windward mark with perfect judgement followed closely by Venus, Lone Star, X140 Lucrezia, (Ado Jardine) and Mayday.
There followed a long run down to mark T Lymington Bank, a close reach against the flooding tide to mark G Tanners and then a challenging beat up to mark C Colten. Places remained unchanged save that Mayday managed to overhaul Lucrezia and round Colten in 4th place.
The final leg was to mark E Pylewell followed by another beat and reach down the river to a Club finish. The top five boats had therefore raced with only one change of position from the first mark and all finished within 1min and 39 seconds of each other.
Interestingly the first five boats were also the top five in the Wednesday series of which 17 out of 21 races were sailed with Rory Paton sailing X48 XL being the convincing overall winner of the Wednesday series.
With Rory's third place overall in the Saturday series (won by Stuart Jardine in Lone Star) his win gave him the overall Cock Boat Cup for a very well sailed campaign.
Full results can be found here.