Weymouth Regatta

After much anticipation of big winds, hard racing and a chance to test skills against the legendary honking conditions; six Cherubs braved the extremes of the Weymouth Regatta. Instead, the biggest challenge faced was not falling asleep on the mammoth voyage to the start line. During the hour long down-wind yawn to the committee boat, kites sagging, tacticians tried their hardest to work out whether the Mars bars would melt by the end of the races 1).

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As for racing, 'Ronin' the newly reformatted B1c (ex GT60 'Beatrix kiddo') showed good speed in light airs and picked up the credit from day 1 with 2 wins and a 2nd from 3 races, although they would have made it 3/3 if they had made better notes at the brief - electing to start another lap at the end of race 1 instead of finishing while leading the entire handicap fleet home! They did however start the day on very low kudos points by getting a tow down to the start line after Adam left his trapeze harness at home and had to drive back to get it while everyone else sailed out to the race area! Atum (scoring 1,3,2) and Shiny (3, 2, 3) fought well, with Shiny being particularly impressive upwind in the light and Atum showing her usual pace downwind. Badger arrived late and broke boards, although successfully joining up with Stu to win the award for most creative sleeping arrangement.

Day 2 started with some wind, but it died after the first race leaving a 4 race series with no discards. Atum took the opportunity to finish off this 'story of fours' by scoring a strong 4th place taking them to 4th overall. Meanwhile Ronin had attempted to recover some kudos from the previous day by electing not to launch but to just go staight for the undercover, while Therapy showed much more enthusiasm and had a good showing, with a fill-in crew not getting a shot at what a cherub is really like. Don’t worry, being based in Weymouth your chance will come! Meanwhile Oops! showed that despite low crew weight they are no good in light winds. Maybe the instruction “DO NOT USE IN LESS THAN 10 KNOTS” on the boom was not to be trifled with. Credit and thanks is due to Atum for waiting around to “buddy” Oops! for the hour's drift back from day 1.

Classified results (fleet handicap results in parenthesis):

  1. Atum-Bom (4)
  2. Ronin (5)
  3. Shiny Beast (6)
  4. Therapy (15)
  5. Badgers Nadgers (17)
  6. Oops!(18)

Many thanks to Castle Cove for having us all for the weekend. Let us all hope the nationals has more wind!


1)
No definite answer, as no control sample remained to end of racing.
  • news/2007/0602.txt
  • Last modified: 2023/03/01 18:37
  • by jp233