Fair Dinkum Sailing in the USA.

by Carl Nelson on 25 Jan 2001 An owner's report of the first weekend's sailing on his brand new Sydney 38 in San Francisco Bay.

This time of year we have the Corinthian Yacht Club mid-winter PHRF series. It is a two-day event, sailing each day over 10 mile courses.

We raced our new brand new Sydney 38 'Fair Dinkum' aka 'The Real Thing' for the first time over the weekend.

On Saturday we corrected out 3rd,

The boat was very fast and responsive; we were beating a Farr 40 boat for boat in wind speeds between 5 to 10 knots.

On Sunday we were first to the weather mark, ahead of two Farr 40s, an ID35 with
Dee Smith at the helm, a Nelson Marek 39, and the rest of a fleet of 50.

We finished 2nd behind a Farr 40 and corrected out 2nd for the weekend.

The boat is stiff and its fast, responsive and easy to sail.

And at the end of the day, it's very easy to manoeuvre into the pen.
We just motored up and did a 180 and in. I've never been able to do that before.

So I picked up my first trophy with the new boat.

After the race, one of the Farr 40 owners was all over the boat.

After going below and looking carefully over the stylish interior he came up on deck and said.

'I can't buy one of these, my crew would think they were on vacation!'

Dave Thomlinson, one of my crew, who is an Australian, just could not resist it.

With a very straight face he said 'Fair Dinkum!'