After a fairly uneventful period of sailing, the new year 2017 started off with the Bloody Mary at Queen Mary Sailing Club. It's a great venue, always well organised, and this year there were 244 boats attending.
Hannah and I were able to get some practice in the Wassal handicap race on 1st January (we did manage to stay ahead of the final Merlin Rocket), but this was a much larger, and longer event.
I had tried to learn lessons from Last Years Regatta, where the winds were fairly strong and the course was very complex. So we arrived really early, got the boat together in good time, and were able to pick up on course notes, which were duly gaffer-taped under a piece of waterproof plastic, just in case...
This year, the Welsh Harp Sailing Club were out in (almost) force, with 4 boats from the club, including Steve Cooper, who ended up 44th in the entire fleet. Most of us were in the photo in the QM clubhouse beforehand.
We had problems with the spinnaker last year, so extra attention paid to rigging was required...
The weather forecast had been for slight winds, disappearing to virtually nothing after an hour or so. But a glance out of the window suggested that the wind was strong enough to be exciting - maybe we were in for a repeat of the last year?
The "Blue" group were launched (boats about 20 mins behind the first gun), and we managed to get orientated and try the line. At the 24 minute gun, we had good speed, and were close to the start, just ducking one boat and then heading off to the right hand side of the course.
I'd set up the "RaceQs" GPS system, and we were later able to review our first beat against Maciej - it looked like we had better boat speed at times, but were not able to point as high, so the other GP14 were beginning to pull away ahead of us.
The first beat was exciting, then it was time to launch the kite. We managed to keep position on the first downwind leg, heading to the red and white flag on top of mark number 2. But the wind was beginning to drop. The wind dropped. And dropped. There was no wind. And the RS200 asymmetric spinnaker boats were lighter than us and catching up.
We did manage to get round the second mark, and headed back upwind for the next beat, but we had had the best wind of the day - the "drifting regatta" was here for the day.
There were seven more marks in the next two hours.
By mark number 4 we were able to throw up the kite again. Although there were a few boats overtaking us, we did seem to have some good boat speak - in the circumstances. But, of course, being a heavy boat, the GP14 was not ideally suited to the conditions. The lighter boats had the advantage.
The winning boat was a Firefly,
We ended up 188th place out of 244 boats that took part.
Not ideal conditions, but we took part. It was a great day - hopes for the rest of this year !
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