The water has started to be pumped back in this week! Reservoir Maintenance must be complete – hurrah!!
The North Beach is now submerged, and in the photo you can see the north steps reach the water now.
It was blowing Storm Bert today – 60mph gusts. Blimey, so strong only the windsurfers were out.
On the upside, we had a great group of radio sailing members arrive for bacon rolls and coffee. Very sociable! Nigel was here to regale us to stories from the IOM World Championship in Australia. Fantastic! Learned a lot….
Five of us at the Club House, and four of us raced. Light A-Rig conditions but a huge reminder that you don’t need a large fleet to get fantastic racing. It was always very close and honestly a couple of races were proper corkers!
(Phil racing Craig’s Vanilla Design)
We got ten races in. David was our “Mr Consistent” of the day with a bunch of second places in the breakfast session and a few firsts in the following session. But honestly, everybody had a go at the front !
(Hugh’s Venti looking good)
Launching wasn’t as bad as I expected – I’m a bit unsteady on various gritty or slopey surfaces, so I was duty RO on the hard beach. However, having taken time to explore and experiment I can see that for the north course, it can be viable (for me anyway!) to walk the long route to the hard beach, then follow the water line along to the main club pontoons. The shore end of the jetties are a couple of metres up the slope. We were on the north course, so is an ok medium walk from the pontoons to the race area – keeps your steps up!!
Have just watched the final day from the Gladstone Worlds. Brilliantly exciting viewing and the organisation and presentation was simply awesome.
A huge well done to Datchet Members – Nigel, David and Sean. Really terrific and enjoyed watching you all compete. Thank you.
To the guys at the top – what a close finish!! So exciting to watch ! One point !!
For the Bar Chat ….adding fuel to the fire:-
I was intrigued at the number of each design that was entered in the regatta. The VickersRC boats seem hugely popular in Australia and New Zealand and rightly so. The Britpop of ANZ perhaps! Along with the Venti the Vickers boats had around 20 qualifiers a piece. From the Northern Hemisphere, the very new VISS design had 7 entries. Simply fewer VISS’s there as it’s a pretty new product, from a land far away.
The designs all look to perform about the same to me. Do they to you`? Do you suppose designers have converged on the optimum shape by now? Let’s face it, just like at any Club the thing that counts most is “who is driving”, and there were some amazing sailors at Gladstone.
When you were watching boat on boat situations, did you visually get an impression of what the quick designs were? The camerawork tended to follow Ian Vickers a lot with his V12, and my gosh his boat looked quick to me. Fabulous.
But Formula One has a Constructors Championship which often leads to interesting differences when viewed alongside the Drivers Championship. I wondered if there was a way to compare design success alongside skipper success.
So I tried looking at the performance of the top four boats of each design… and then the top five boats. This is what I found !!
Next time we are in the clubhouse queueing for coffees, we can talk about this !!
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