We had a great morning’s racing!! The big boys,.. Phil, Graham, Nigel and David… were down at the Marblehead Games at Guildford. That left Hugh, Darren and Richard to race at home with Howard spectating and threatening to get his IOM together soon! Peter had a puncture and Steve was wall-papering!!
We had medium to top end A rig breezes and launched off the south pontoon and raced the course over that side.
Richard wasn’t last in all the races. 🙂
This is what the water level looks like at the minute.
I’ve watched our amazing club member, Craig R, a whole number of times measuring his sail twists, his cambers and his slots… with simply his fingers. Amazing really – and he uses the same hands whether he is tuning an IOM or a Marblehead !!! You’ll have seen similar at your Club I’m sure.
Last week in the bar, Nigel B (fresh back from the IOM worlds – check out his blog on http://www.nigelbarrow.co.uk !) was talking about the same idea and saying he finds fingers so much more convenient than getting out measuring tapes and rulers. Interesting, but as a learner you sort of just log these comments away for future use!!
I’ve been pondering whether Nigel was just winding me up, but then I came across this:-
Screenshot
I know what you’re going to say…. all our hands are different sizes, left may be different to right, and have knuckle bumps but the point may be that once you have figured out your hand dimensions it wouldn’t take long to memorise this… or write it on with a felt tip pen!!
If you’re interested in this idea, you might also want to read this article that we published many months ago in the “Boat Setup and Tuning” Category of this website.
A great day, today. We had seven boats present, with six racing. Commodore Phil was prevented from the start line by a little boat trouble, so stayed to cheer to the rest of us on.
(Photo a moment ago showing the increased water level today.)
It was pretty mild (mid-teen degrees), but very slightly raining the whole session. Once you got your wet weather kit on, it was fine!!
The reservoir has been pumped to perhaps half full now, and we had a choice of three launching facilities – the main jetty, “the steps” and the Clubhouse pontoon. I am delighted to report they were all pretty much easy and without problem. Next weekend, 7th and 8th, the main Club has a huge event named the Datchet Flyer… hopefully for the Club it will be very crowded, so we plan it as a lay weekend for radio sailing.
Racing today was surprisingly close, in an A rig Southerly, and the fleet was usually pretty bunched up – this is code for “Richard was keeping up better” !! Probably when we were rigging we were all thinking “is this B Rig weather?”, but the breeze slowly dropped back. The course was pretty simple – no top spreader, and the leeward gate was also the start/finish line. Craig was there developing his printed boat (interesting), and we had some pretty good social in the Clubhouse breaks. Large topics of conversation were updates from the MYA AGM and jumble sale (some proper bargains there!) and lots of interest in the chatter about the forthcoming mass production Joysway One Metre…. which for those that have seen it was pretty impressive. Target price allegedly £1200. Nice. Imagine joining a sport where you can actually get your first equipment in under two years!!! Apparently the build run is 2500 boats at a time!
Another snippet that caught my attention in the Joysway discussion was that apparently schools in China quite normally offer both dinghy sailing and radio sailing on the curriculum. Interesting!!
As we all departed after lunch, Nigel and Dorian were still in deep tuning with Craig!! The making of Champions 🙂
Datchet Radio Sailing - Making It All Much Easier !! 