Dusting off the boat to make sure everything is still attached and locating your lucky sailing gear at the last minute can be stressful. Of course we are told that it’s always better to plan ahead and do all the preparation prior to this point, but who has the time? In the end it really doesn’t matter if everything is perfect. That’s the whole point of the first sailing day of the season, to find out what’s been lost or forgotten and to make a list of stuff that needs to be done so things run more smoothly on the next race day. The catch is of course that you make time to cross all those to do things of the list before next race day.
What would be sad is, for what every reason you decide that it’s not worth the effort to turn up on a sailing day, especially the first race day of the season. There are certainly times when I feel this way. Those Saturday mornings when having a lie in, reading the Saturday paper or having a nice coffee somewhere with your beloved seems far more appealing. But from my experience it’s always worth the effort, if not just to sample the famous PKSC hamburgers.
We were certainly lucky with the weather for this first race of the 2014 – 2015 sailing season, slightly overcast with 10 knots of North Easterly, near perfect conditions to easy everyone in after a few months break from competition.
Thanks to the duty crew of Bob and Jonny Porter for setting a good course and looking out for us on the water.
And didn’t the weather it bring out the punters, with a great roll up of cats, dinghies and 3 TYs. Jim Curry would have made it 4 TYs if it was not for a faulty tow vehicle. Frou Frou benefited from Jims misfortune by picking up one of his regular crew, Richard Hipsley, for today’s race.
The three starters were Momentum with Barry, Ray, Phil and Kim aboard, Offshore Account with Dave Robbie and Oscar aboard and Frou Frou with me and Richard aboard.
From Frou Frou’s position in the middle of the TY fleet, things appeared to go remarkably smoothly for race 1 of the season. We didn’t see many sail changing mishaps or crew overboard/mutinies and the like. To cut a long story short it was close racing all the way. The crew of Offshore Account sailed impressively, not letting the faster boats out of their site for the entire race. Final places were:
Poinscore 1
Place Boat Name Corrected time PBH (minutes)
First Offshore Account 60.5525
Second Frou Frou 66.0956
Third Momentum 66.1218
Hopefully we will get a few more starters as the season progresses so we can share more of the goodness that a day on the water can give.
The end Trev