Day 1: 5th October. A great start to the 2014 fleet championships. The wind looked rubbish when we first went out, but soon filled in and became trapeze-worthy by mid morning.
In the first race, Paul and I had a brilliant start, neatly messing up Richard & Clive in the process, and left the rest of the fleet trailing. We were never really threatened after that, and won quite easily with Peter & Karen 2nd and Mo & Holly 3rd at the finish. Richard & Clive were first Silver Fleet boat, with Dave & Nick keeping them honest all the way round.
In the afternoon, Paul and I had an OCS-go-back-and-try-again disastrous sort of start due to some serious luffing on the line, and were left trailing by just about everybody else. We spent the entire race playing catch-up, while Mo & Holly fought it out with Peter & Karen and Helen & Paul for first place. It was a pretty intense battle up there for about two and a half laps, until Mo missed the toe-straps while tacking and fell out of the boat. This slowed up Helen & Paul, who were just behind at the time, whilst releasing Peter & Karen who promptly zoomed off into the distance down the fabulous 3-sail reach, never to be seen again. Further back, David & Nick(also OCS-and-returned-at-the-start) finally overtook Jane & Pat right at the end of the race. There was plenty of good stuff going on in the middle of the fleet too, but I wasn't watching.
Many thanks to Iain, Tom and Mike for setting some excellent courses, and to all the guys and gals who turned out to take part.
A great day!
Day 2: 19th October. Pretty windy to start with, rising to silly-windy by the end of the first race. Peter & Mike beat us pretty easily, even with stopping for a quick centre-board inspection halfway round. Bob & Paul were the only other boat to finsh, everyone else got blown away. A bit like my little GoPro lookalike camera, which was washed away off the deck, escaped from the waterproof case tied to the boat, and sank. There was some epic footage on that little sucker too.
By lunch time it was looking fairly OTT, so we postponed the 4th race and went home for a lie down.
And there's a video from Dave here, but I can't get it to embed in this post :-( http://youtu.be/u6Yxc1yxPuU
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