Commodores Cup 2020 - encouraging teamwork

I have been gradually easing myself into sailing over the last few months.

The Welsh Harp Sailing Club have put together some very sensible precautions and systems to ensure that everyone is safe, based on RYA advice. For example, any racing is at owners' risk, and we have to carry a mast-head bouyancy aid in order to prevent dinghys becoming inverted in the case of a capsize. This takes some of risks away from having safety boat crews who are limited, due to corona virus.

Nevertheless, I did not want to take too many risks going back onto the water. So for the last few weeks I have just contented myself with single-handed practice in 13941. I have done this for a number of weeks on early Saturday mornings, and then come off the water before everyone else piles in for the Saturday Training and/or Racing.

As my own confidence grew about the level of risks, I also helped out with Dinghy Instructing in a recent RYA Level 1/2 course which was run by the Welsh Harp Sailing Club. 

Finally, I began to tag along with the "Plain Sailing" practice, and provided some Dinghy coaching for a family with their own GP14. The fact that this was a transom-main rigged boat did add to the excitement !

So having built up a bit of confidence, it was time to get back into racing.

The opportunity for this was the Commodores Cup, which is an annual event for GP14 and Lasers, run in the form of a full regatta over a complete day. 

For health reasons, we did not have any lunch provided, and tea and cakes were missing. But it was still an attractive opportunity.

Tom agreed to crew for me, and is also keen to crew for me going forward. He is married to Sarah, who crewed for me a year ago. Tom had also previously crewed for Lesley Kaye. Lesley was also a mentor to me over the years, but had sadly moved away to Portland - which is a great place to sail. So I had a crew member who was very competent, which really helped my confidence.

My aim for the day was to enjoy the time, and "feel the boat", rather than trying to intellectualise everything that was happening.

Wind was fairly mild, but we would need to hike out at times. It was varying in direction from the South or from the West. So we knew that we could not use one lap of a race as too much of a guide for the following lap. Wind was force 1 to 2 only.

For the First Race, the course was 2-1-6-7-3, which built a kink into the course, which required a bit of forward planning. It looked like a pin-end biased line. However, I suspected that we would have more chance with clear air on the committee boat end. I was proved right, as we were level with the fleet up the first beat. However, we tacked too early for the mark, and were caught up on a port tack against a lot of other boats. Prudence dictated that we dropped back. This put us mid-fleet. 

I was pleased that we were "fighting" with the lower part of the fleet for much of the time. We were able to make a couple of moves at the leeward mark, and gain a place or two, and then lost that on the beat. (we need to find out why this happened). All in all, we finished 9th out of 12 boats.

The Second Race had the same course, but this time we ducked some of the fleet to find clear air at the start. But we were lower down the first beat than previously. Tom's spinnaker work was really helping us keep our pace. I was having to concentrate hard to bear away in gusts, but head up slightly in a lull, in order to keep the wind flowing over the sails. Again, we were 9th out of 12.

For the Final race, the course was changed so that there were more spinnaker gybes, and the course was shorter.We were caught up in a gaggle of boats on the committee boat end during the start, and probably crossed the line last. So any a gain was going to be an achievement. We dropped back to 10th. But were rewarded by the fact that we had beaten off attacks from behind, and were catching other boats ahead. 

In conclusion, Tom & I totally enjoyed the experience. We had taken some boats in the good times, and lost at others. But confidence was high.

I'm hoping that we will be able to build on this for the future- hopefully move up the fleet a bit.