Who was out this weekend?.....

Come and say hello then I'll be there Today (Sunday)

you wanna try with a crew that ways just uner 10stone and a 9.5 stone helm

well, today was my first day in a furball.

it was fun

in the race we had to retire because i am only 11 stone and that is not enough on the wire to let the boat foot off to plane when its blowing a lot. so on the first beat we were pinching through all the chop and we had the cockpit full of water up to the gunwhales. that was amusing. so we retired on the second beat.

then we went in, i gave my helm the tapeze harness. that was fun. now we had more like 15 stone on the wire and she went like a dream. the boat is soooooo much nicer than a laser upwind (mind you most things are) and then we bore off for a reach and for the best part of that reach i could see NOTHING. absolutely nothing. it was great, spray everywhere and it felt really fast.

came in again and i was grinning for the rrest of the day, still am

Good racing on the Medway with plenty of wind so we were easily fully powered. 

1st Race - great start got us to the first mark first but the 800s crept past on the next fetch, however we were able to almost keep up on the next long beat.  Our rival 4000 had a bad start and barely gained on us allthe time we were going upwind.  When we came to the downwind return to the club we ran fast and deep and seemed to be going well but after about half way back we realised that our rivals were gaining.  As the river gets narrower I felt it might be better to maintain the deep technique, however our rivals are always keen on sailing hot and since we were going low they kept it that way and gained until they past us just before the finish line.  A good experiment - I've never had the guts to maintain one style throughout a race and see if it really pays.  In this case it didn't, but it wasn't by much - we lost about 200m in 8km.

2nd Race - wind over tide and rough further down river.  Again went well and were dicing with our rival 4000 but they eventually got past when we crash tacked to avoid a collision.  Back down wind in all the chop we really suffered with a lengthy capsise and got a bit tangled up with two moored bulk carriers at the power station.  It was a case of being too cautious during a gybe and rolling in.  It is important to maintain the speed but easy to say and not so easy to do when the river is so rough.

As you can see its always exciting sailing on the Medway.  Here's a picture of our sailing area - with many thanks to Google Earth.