Wessex Winter Warmer 2016
by Jamie Barker 23 Feb 2016 18:35 GMT
13-14 February 2016
Wessex Winter Warmer © Cormac Starling & Jonty Cook
The 13th and 14th February 2016 saw the return of Wessex Sailing Club's (Southampton University) Wessex Winter Warmer. 18 of the UK's top teams including 13 university teams headed to Spinnaker Sailing Club for some high level racing.
Day one saw 108 races completed after a prompt start and very few stoppages thanks to 4 flights of boats enabling rolling starts. Each team managed to complete 12 races of the round robin with the Birdham Bandits leading the way (12/12) closely followed by Society and BYOB (11/12). Exeter Black were leading the way out of the university teams in 5th place (9/12). Despite the day starting rather damp, it eventually dried out and with 15-18kts of wind all day, we flew through the races.
Sunday saw the sun come out and glamorous conditions of 12-15kts. We split the teams into 2 flights of Gold and Silver, allowing teams to race other teams of more similar ability. By 13:30, we had completed all races of the leagues (8 per team), there was then a first-to-2 repecharge between the first placed team in the silver league, SSCM, and the 4th placed team in the gold league, Exeter Black, which Exeter Black won.
This gave us our two semi-final line ups of the Birdham Bandits against Exeter Black, and Society versus BYOB. Both the Birdham Bandits and BYOB won the first two of the races allowing them to progress to the final.
The first-to-2 petit final went the distance, with Society taking the first race 234, but Exeter Black came back in the second race with a 235. The final race was closely fought, with Exeter 126 around mark 4, but a great final beat from Society saw them take the race 145 giving them 3rd place overall.
The best of 5 final showed the class of competition over the weekend, but the dominance of the Birdham Bandits came through with them taking the first 3 races 124 and the title of Wessex Winter Warmer 2016 Champions, and only losing 1 race all weekend. We also managed to get some awesome drone footage of the weekend thanks to Jamie Diamond along with hundreds of photos – please see our Facebook page.
Congratulations to the Birdham Bandits on their victory (Tim Saxton, Holly Scott, George Yeoman, Sophie Ormsby, Sam Littlejohn and Kate Devereux). They said this about the event: "The warmer this year was run spectacularly. For every team to get at least 20 races each really made this event stand out only second to the Wilson. The Soton team worked tirelessly to make sure it all ran smoothly, and with the help of the umpires it was a really enjoyable weekend with great racing on both days."
It was great to get so many races in, with every team sailing 20 races, and some as many as 27 in just two days!
A massive thank you to all the teams who took part, the officials, Spinnaker Sailing Club for hosting the event, all of our Sponsors and all members of Wessex Sailing Club who ran the event!