Tag Archives: rm

Informal Racing, Match Racing or just Practicing Your Starts? Need an easy Start Timer??

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If you are turning up at the Club to do some informal racing, or maybe with two or three buddies for a little match racing tournament – or even just practicing your starts …. you might like a race timer that you can simply run from your iPhone or iPad.

I’ve been trying this one above. It’s free to download and use.

You need to configure it to be close to what we use at The Club on formal race days. You “configure” the settings to do that. You might find it useful to try the ones I have selected below. Starts at two minutes, then calls ten second intervals 60 down to 10, then counts each second down to zero and sounds a good starting horn.

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Nigel’s Reminder on the Importance of Telltales….

Our member, Nigel Barrow, writes an excellent blog about his exploits in radio sailing. I expect you all read it.

Nigel has published a great reminder that, like big boat sailing, telltales are extremely important in boat set up and tuning. This is Nigel’s excellent blog post :-

https://www.nigelbarrow.co.uk/post/thought-for-the-day-telltales-are-your-friend

Most of us already have a pair of telltales on our various jibs. What Nigel has me thinking about now is using four sets of tell tales (see photo and article).

You know how it is, the slightest bit of rain causes tell tales to stick to the sail and be useless. Nigel recommends a fly fishing spray I’d not heard of before called “fly float”. The idea is to stop your tell tales sticking down when damp. I wish I had known about fly float in my 25 year career in Flying Fifteens!

I’ve checked out fly float and it costs about £5. However, Royal Mail will not ship aerosols so you end up paying £6.50 postage extra to a courier. I need to find a local fishing tackle shop and see if I can get some there. I may be able to scrounge some off fishing friends and try out Nigel’s idea.

I can see now that the national sales figure for telltales is about to soar!….

Club Results – First Sunday of the Season, February 4th…!!

It was something of a blustery day with a great eight competitors for the first race session of 2024 !! Many members were over at Chipstead at the IOM Open – and I might add they did very well….

Rohan made a tidy job of cleaning up the day at Datchet – well done, Rohan !!

Next Weekend is Ten Raters and IOMs. :)