Who was out this weekend?.....

The Medway was windy on Saturday and howling on Sunday.  We survived the 1st race on Sunday which was short anyway and possibly beat our personal highest speed records when we were hit by a massive and long lasting gust on a deep reach with the kite up.  The crew was scared - she was sure she was going to get hurt going so fast and being "high out of the water".  I thought it was something akin to heaven and it will live in my dreams for years.  In truth it was about 1kilometre in about 2 minutes and even those on shore thought we were flying from their vantage point which was a long way away.

The afternoon was less successful.  It was a long distance race that took us down river where with wind against tide and an unobstructed fetch it was wild.  We were the only high performance boat that ventured out except a Vortex, and although we carried the kite downwind we ran deep to avoid leaping over too many waves and it also reduced the number of gybes required.  It wasn't fast but it was safe.  Back upwind had us though with a blast that flattened us and we had a lot of trouble getting the boat upright again.  The combination of white horses, sharp chop and big gusts meant we went right over, time and time again.

We eventually made it upright but headed home fearing we just might not be able to raise the strength to get back up on the board again.  As it happened we capsized again on the way back and we did have the strength!

What a boat, tough enough to crash through surf, drop off waves and leap to windward when we got it right.  So powerfull in 25K its quite awe inspiring - well scary really.  I loved it, but it was right to retire, we were on our limit.

Well done Eloise (sp??)

Did you get any pics of me and Mark from today as Mark said there was a few?

Nope .. No sailing this weekend ...

Spent the day Saturday trying to get rid of loads of tyre / dirt marks from the Vareo, and changing sail numbers etc, and packing away ...

Ready for the Vareo Nationals next weekend

I'm not allowed to talk about Sunday ... Orders.

The Medway was abysmal.  Very little wind and full of dead patches and massive shifts.

Just to give you an example.  We couldn't get the downwind angles right and sailed ourselves to the back of the fleet.  However luckily we were on the correct side of a massive shift (about 120 deg) and so caught up with the fleet.  On the way back up the river we were on the tail of a 59er.  Only 2 kilometres from the club we got past them and finished about 30mins later.  After lunch and sitting on the balcony we were amazed to see the 59er finishing - probably at least half an hour had passed since our finish.  We had also overtaken a 5000 and a MPS in the last kilometre and they finished alongside the 59er.  So there were several boats which had taken over an hour to cover a kilometre and we had done 2 in 30 minutes.

The afternoon was worse and we elected to get towed in from 3rd place as we were already 2 hours later than our normal time of departure from the club.

Weymouth:

Saturday started out with a reasonable wind, around what was forecast. That soon built, and there were quite a lot of us couldn't quite stomach the thought of the fourth race- our inexperience especially was showing, with multiple swims.

though the forecast was for rubbish wind, Sunday turned out rather nice, and it would have been much more pleasent to have had race four on Sunday rather than Sturday. Ah well.