Musto Skiffs at the Ovington Boats Inland Championships

Musto Skiffs at the Ovington Inland Championships © Tim Olin / www.olinphoto.co.uk

Musto Skiffs at the Ovington Inland Championships © Tim Olin / www.olinphoto.co.uk

A light but stable breeze greeted the 27 entrants at Grafham Water Sailing Club and with the usual professional management of the club, the 140 odd boats from all the Ovington classes launched for their day's racing on time on three race course areas.

On Saturday, four races were held back to back with our class sharing the course with the 49er and 49erFX fleet. This was an official ranking event for them and it's nice to see the Olympic wannabies in action before they depart for Rio. Can't think why anyone would want to go to Rio but hey, that's up to them...

For our fleet, race 1 was a North of England affair, won by Derwent Reservoir's Alastair Conn, followed by club compatriot Dan Trotter. However, races 2 - 4 were dominated by Sam Barker from Castle Cove, Weymouth who took all three race wins, with Datchet's Ben Schooling the only sailor getting close to Sam's consistency for the day.

A welcome return to the fleet by Dan's dad, Ian Trotter, saw him getting back into the swing of things pretty quickly, but a BFD in race 4 dropped him down the table.

Ben Schooling and Jamie Hilton compered the evening's quiz night and with teams from all the Ovington Boats fleets taking part the days competition continued on well into the evening. In fact the last round entitled Musto Quiff, which as it's name suggests involves each team presenting a team member showing off the best bit of hair styling possible, had one of the 29er teams disqualified by judge Emma Hepplewhite for an illegal use of structural reinforcing to their quiff!

The sailors were then treated to a great fireworks display and then slowly turned in for the evening.

Musto Skiffs at the Ovington Inland Championships - photo © Tim Olin

Sunday, dawned dull with again a light breeze. The fleet launched for a further 3 races. Clearly the evenings entertainment hadn't put Sam off as he took his 4th straight bullet, closely followed by Ben Schooling, Kit Stenhouse from Rutland and Ian Trotter. Ian then took race 6 from Richard Stenhouse and Ant Chapman.

The final race of the championship got away in the lightest breeze of the weekend with Ben taking the gun from Richard and Kit.

Musto Skiffs at the Ovington Inland Championships - photo © Thom Touw / www.thomtouw.com

It was good to see competitors from such a spread of clubs from around the UK coming together for the annual end of season event and a big thank you to our class sponsors as well as Orange Mountain Bikes and of course Chris, Duncan and Nathan from Ovington Boats for supporting the event.

Overall Results: