RS Feva South West Open Training at Royal Torbay Yacht Club
by James Dowrick 8 Feb 2017 07:04 GMT
4-5 February 2017
RS Feva South West Open Training at Torbay © Claire Burns
On the weekend of the 4th & 5th February twenty-eight keen RS Feva sailors travelled from all over the South West to attend the 3rd weekend of the 2017 RS Feva South West Open Training. The venue this time around was the waters of the English Rivera, Royal Torbay Yacht Club to be exact. This year's RS Feva Nationals will be hosted here in just under 4 months time so it was a great opportunity for the youngsters to sail here in advance. The coaches for the weekend were Bex Partridge (Welsh National Squad Coach), Charlie Makepeace (Renowned Team Racing Sailor) and James Dowrick (Experienced RS Feva Sailor). Below is a weekend report by Rosie Duncan from Roadford Lake SC.
On Saturday, we were blessed with a lovely sunny day but it was bitterly cold when we arrived at 9:00am. First we got our mast up and then rigged all the parts to our boat. When we were happy we had everything set up correctly we went up to the club house, dumped our gear in the changing rooms and headed in to the training room for a briefing with our coaches Bex, James and Charlie. When we got out on to the water we started our exercises for the morning which started with a follow my leader, then led into tacking and gybing on the whistle. To end the morning session we finished with the downwind slalom exercise, which was my favourite out of all of them because of the speed we were going from using our spinnaker and the boat handling skills we had to concentrate on to get around the turning marks without capsizing!
At about 12ish we came off the water dropped our sails and went up to the club house for lunch which was provided by the kitchen staff at the Yacht Club. At 2 o'clock we had our briefing for the afternoon session which started off with our 3 coaches giving tips on what we could to do to improve on parts of our sailing they had spotted in the morning session.
The plan & focus for the afternoon was based on racing, with a bit of sail control chucked in the mix. We set up our boats and our coaches went around and checked everyone's rig tension as the wind was meant to pick up from the morning, it was already quite windy! Our first exercise for the afternoon was river banks, where we had to sail between the two coach boats. When we got to the race course, it was set up as a windward/leeward course, with one of the coaches, Charlie, in the safety boat which was anchored in the middle. The aim of the game was to tack & gybe each time we passed him but had to get within a couple of boat lengths from the rib so he could examine our techniques. Meanwhile Bex & James were chasing around the course keeping an eye on everyone's boat handling.
We were then meant to finish off the day with a points race but the weather started to close in so a quick game of pac-man was played to encourage us to race back to shore. We de-rigged the boat and had a final debrief for the day.
On Sunday, we arrived at the harbour to find some of our boat covers were covered in ice! We re-rigged our boats and went for our briefing. The plan for the morning was gybing on the whistle on the way to the start area. When we got there our coaches had setup a box area which we had to stay inside during the 3 minute countdown. We practised lots of different starting techniques such as sitting on the line and finding the bias end of the line. Bex, Charlie & James kept this interesting by always changing the bias and were coming around to us individually to find out what we thought of our starts each time and to give more pointers.
This took us up to 12 o'clock so we headed back in for another lunch stop at the yacht club, another quick briefing about racing, and then onto the water (minus 2 boats from the original fleet of 14). We had 3 races to finish off the weekend and again our coaches were following everyone around giving out guidance. After a great weekend of learning new things, I know I am really looking forward to the next weekend at Chew Valley. Over the last three weekends my sister (crew) and I have enjoyed perfecting our spinnaker sailing and learning more race techniques, all thanks to our wonderful coaches. Finally, thank you to Royal Torbay Yacht Club for being fantastic hosts.
Thank you to all the sailors & parents for coming to the Royal Torbay Yacht Club for this training weekend. We look forward to welcoming you to the next training weekend which is on the 11th & 12th March at Chew Valley Lake Sailing Club. You can sign up by visiting the RS Feva South West Facebook Page... if you are interested in coming along and have any questions please contact us at southwest@rsfeva.org.uk. Finally, the 2017 RS Feva Spring Championships will be held at Haying Island Sailing Club on the 25th & 26th March and hopefully one of our brilliant SWOT coaches will be joining the sailors. See you there!