Tag Archives: nigel barrow

IOM Sunday – Light Breezes But a Ton of Fun…!!

( Mummy with Baby Ducks give Nigel a Swim-Past )

We had six One Metres with us today, including a potential new member! Phil, Craig, Nigel, Dorian, Richard from the club. Honestly the breeze was a bit light, but there was always enough to go round and we had a blast! Craig was PROing and wisely in these conditions set us a bunch of sprint races out to a windward mark and back. Far enough – We had plenty of fun and all learned a lot.

Doctor Dorian did a couple of amazing IOM tuning clinics in the coffee break, and as one of the happy recipients I can only say how grateful and amazed I was !!

The racing adjourned for lunch and then the Eastbourne victory trio of Nigel, Dorian and Craig put in some serious boat-on-boat tuning practice. As ever with this sport you can often learn more by watching the top personalities than by competing against them!! It was really impressive – lots of tweaking, practice starts, in phase and out of phase tacking and so on. Surprisingly revealing and great to see the two Proteus design boats going so well…. Nigel was especially nippy today !!

The sharp eyed DRS members will notice first our new on-course windsocks, but also the idea needs an upward tweak to get the sock tails out of the water. PH is on it !!

(Our Datchet Heroes from Eastbourne – left to right Nigel, Dorian and Craig)

Honestly when these guys are concentrating you can feel the vibrations in the banter !

Nigel – just tweaking the spoodler adjuster

Dorian in front – Craig and Nigel in pursuit!

Windsor in the distance, on-course Windsock has a sense of humour

Next week the IOM Rankings event – two days, 35-40 entrants !!

Super Y&Y Report on The IOM Nationals at Lincoln…!!

click here to see it:-

https://www.yachtsandyachting.com/news/285448/IOM-National-Championship-at-Lincoln

Sunday 13th April – Marblehead Sunday ….!!

It was a cracking day at the Club today – very Westerly, B Rigs… often top end!! I was in three layers and still had to go and get a jacket on!! We had a terrific fleet of six Marbleheads with a seriously intense level of competition. Five of the fleet were F6s and Graham B was our guest of honour!!

We shall have full results in due course from HM, but it’s fair to report that there were some cracking races in the ten race programme. In terms of sheer speed, in the often wavy conditions, the Commodore’s F6 was totally on fire – around half the races won, and at least two of them were runaways! We shall see how the points turn out though as Nigel B’s F6 was fabulously consistent as well as fast. Hugh M sailed a couple of proper fire-crackers too. The starts were an interesting call in the westerly and generally the game played out close up along the wall for us all to see. Graham H made several superbly good starts, and racing was altogether pretty close. Often the lee end of the line along the wind curve of the wall was surprisingly quick – and Phil H split from the fleet out in the bay using this routing pretty often in his excellent morning.