Well the fleet is gradually reassembling itself after the big freeze. The big attraction this Sunday was the temperature, which I think made it into double figures and didn't have a minus sign in front of it either. But the wind was looking a bit troublesome on WindGuru, and it turned up in big lumps on the lake which made life a bit tricky.
First up for team Deano and Poorly Paul was to change the wheel on the trolley, thereby making launching a whole lot easier. Then zoom out to the start and it didn't seem too bad until the jib made a funny noise and started trying to climb down the forestay. I rapidly deduced that the string holding it up had come untied, so we retreated to a sandy bay to re-tie it. Then we re-launched and hacked back up to the committee boat just in time to miss the start. Well OK, we like a challenge. However, on the next tack the port jib sheet promptly shredded itself, so we were unable to really get in the groove upwind. I was also distracted by the view of the diy repair on the leech of the mainsail coming gradually adrift.
Still, we did manage to overtake everybody apart from Peter and Mike up the first beat, and then got the latter pair by virtue of a bit of kite flying across to E, but they rapidly overtook us again and went on to achieve a pretty huge lead. In the end we bailed out at the 3rd time round OL, me having too much water in my ears, eyes and drysuit to be able to work out if we had finished or not. As it happened, we hadn't, and we could have overtaken Peter and Mike on the last lap if we'd done it and stayed upright, as they had a couple of prolonged swims. But I figured I'd had quite enough fun for one day, so we put the boat away and went for lunch.
Next week, maybe warm and not stupidly windy ?
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