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Race Reports – Weekend of 20/21 July 2024 ….!!

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Results from the weekend.


Saturday saw four 95s in a light breeze on the south course, we managed 8 races in two batches of four with a coffee break and a trim.  Geoffrey had a bad day on the water but happy to be sailing and at times the racing was very close with Phil and Hugh battling most of the day with Peter ready to snap at their heels when the opportunities arose.
Phil. 8 points and 4 wins 
Hugh 9 points with 3 wins
Peter 14 points with 1 win
Geoffrey 24 points

On Sunday we had four Marbleheads including Richard Uttley’s brand new F-6 on the water for the first time.  We again managed 8 races this time on the north course, again with four before and after coffee.  Richard Jones had an unfortunate communication glitch in the first race after coffee and this proved terminal for him which was bad news for him because although scoring four fourths before coffee was often close to the others for many of his four races.  Richard Uttley had his F-6 going very well out of the box to the extent of  scoring a bullet in race 5.  As Mr Uttley only came with a lightweight A and a B.  We all agreed on B, thought for most of the time we were a bit under powered upwind, despite the two rigs being nominally the same area.
Hugh 7 points 5 wins
Richard Uttley 11 points 1 win
Phil 12 points 2 wins
Richard Jones 26 points

HM

A Small Improvement in Battery Storage….!!

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Nigel B recently showed me a very neat little battery bag you get from amazon.

Actually you buy them in bags of four at an embarrassingly low price. You can get two or three 2-cell LIPOs or LIFEs in there easily.

I’ve been wanting to neaten up and smarten up my battery storage recently. These things are ideal, because of the outer bag that I use.

It keeps all the batteries in neat little pockets so that during race day it is much easier to remember where you are with power supplies. I reckon I could get another four little bags and then easily store 8 of them inside my outer bag. Very neat and tidy.

All inside this single outer bag. You could easily store 20-24 batteries in there very neatly, bagged boy connector type maybe.

Thank you, Nigel!! This was the Amazon page…. £14 for four.

Spektrum Tittle Tattle….!!

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So that we could write our Datchet radio sailing manuals for all the Transmitter Brands, I went ahead and sorted out trying them all.

In asking around, you get positive and negative opinions (passionate usually!) about all of them. When asking around about experience with Spektrum, more than once I was told that the kit had to be abandoned due to boats falling out of range. This was naturally accompanied by the views of others saying “used them for years, never had a single problem”…. (more passion!)

Of course, a boat can drop signal for all sorts of reasons – transmitter, receiver, carbon fibre, battery etc, but when your much respected friends say they had a problem you pay attention, don’t you? It might be the transmitter, it might not.

So I went ahead and bought a new Spektrum DX8e (on special offer, I might add!!). Before even hooking it up, I managed to break the thing – entirely my fault, by the way. So RW took it off to see the Spektrum doctor for me.

What was interesting was that RWs Model Shop (AL’s Hobbies) knew straight away after repair to give it a range check. I’m thinking they knew what to look for. They promptly sent it back to the distributor. It only took a couple of days to turn around.

The diagnosis was a faulty battery connector which had to be replaced. It was all so quick I’m thinking they had seen all this before a few times – a big batch problem maybe.

Anyway, if you have set aside your Spektrum after losing contact, it may all be to do with a suspect battery connector. You might want to get that looked at.

I’m grateful to Gary at AL’s Hobbies for sorting mine out 🙂