Sunday 8 August 2010

Practice race

A fantastic race in windy wavey conditions. We could only manage an apalling start 100 yds behind after we took on water just before. But we got to the windward mark mid fleet but we retired when we filled up again at the busy leward mk. Ah well thats what a practice race is for. Dave and betty finished first - and only - RSC boat.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Ben,
Why was the boat taking on water ?
Rory

Anonymous said...

Have you checked the bungs? Otherwise it looks like a bigger bucket Liz!
Tan

Anonymous said...

Them pesky gybes..

Ben Lumby said...

HI Rory - thats a good question - More to do with dodgy boat handling than leaky boats. The first time, before the start, I convinced Liz it was a good idea to try a gybe on a nice big wave - like we used to do windsurfing with our eyes closed. There were no flags up yet from the commiittee boat so we reckoned there was plenty of time to recover if it all went wrong. The gybe went really smoothly, amazing down the face of teh wave planing from one gybe to the next, but then after we gybed I headed up into the wind a bit far, caught the wave side on and scooped a half-boatfull of water. The flags had gone up while we were gybing and we were running out of time to get back up to the start - and we were late.

So we sailed the first beat while bailinng hard, and by the end of teh first lap were finally a dry boat again. On the leward mark we were forced to round the mark really tightly to avoid hitting an outside give-way boat. Again we scooped a boatfull of water - a disadvantage with these older boats which dont have the mouled side tanks.

Long answer to a short question. Cheers. Ben