As I saw (and remembered) it – Saturday 8th November

By Kevin Molen

It was great to get racing this week after last weeks abandonment due to the storms.

Heals was away this week so Miller (I) had the keys to Rapscallion with Josh filling in in the middle. Nice to see The Saint out again – though short lived! With Aspen not sailing, Mark jumped on board. Jake once again was helming Knot Easy in Jason’s absence.

7 boats hit the start line in a 20kt northerly with an outgoing tide! The leading boats all headed for the left-hand corner. NGHAM were first there and tacked off to the top. Rapscallion after having tacked off early were second to the port lay. Just behind them The Saint had tacked off earlier and were coming back on starboard when they encountered Waterloo Too coming in on port. Patto misjudged the duck and collected their backstay. Normally in this situation the rig comes down, but by a stroke of luck the bottom part of the backstay snapped denying The Saint a new rig but their day was over! W2 completed a 360 and headed back up the beat. The other 3 boats took a more middle left route up the beat.

At the top NGHAM has a comfortable 20 sec lead over Rapscallion who rounded 2 lengths ahead of W2. Just behind them was Knot Easy, followed by The Project and Athena. With full on conditions on the run not everyone carried a kite. The top 4 did though with no dramas on the run the positions were the same at the bottom mark. Athena’s day came to an end when they broke their vang on the run. Knot Easy claim to have hit 11 kts downwind – not bad for an Etchells!

On the second  beat NGHAM covered the left hand edge. Rapscallion tacked off early instead of just following Brad. Halfway up the beat they crossed W2 by a length but misjudged the dump on top in the heavy conditions and W2 managed to squeeze out and ahead to be second around the top by a couple of lengths. 

Rapscallion had lost their spinnaker brace under the boat so lost a lot of distance while they sorted it and denying them any chance to chase down W2. Knot Easy also had a drama hoisting their kite and sailed under jib while sorting the problem allowing The Project to pass, they subsequently hoisted but couldn’t run The Project down.

At the finish NAGHAM had a very comfortable lead to take the days first gun from W2 and Rapscallion. The Project crossed the line 4^th for a great result in the heavy conditions.

N.B: Post race W2 graciously withdrew due to their collision with The Saint thereby promoting Rapscallion into 2^nd and The Project into 3^rd.

For race 2 we were down to just 4 starters as The Project had also called it a day. Again, the left was favoured and once again NGHAM lead around the top followed by W2, Rapscallion and Knot Easy who elected not to fly a kite on the run.

Midway down the run NGHAM broached, wrapped the brand new kite Brad had scored that morning at the clubs buy/sell/swap and they spent the next few minutes flogging the life out of it before giving up and taking it down. Both W2 and the Rappers screamed past with W2 leading comfortably at the bottom by 7-8 lengths.

While they headed left, NGHAM went up the middle but not long after Brad was wriggling on the floor like an upturned turtle and the boat went head to wind where the jib hanks all parted company from the forestay; no problem –  just put them back on and finish ahead of Knot Easy who had broken their tiller extension on the run. With the two crew of the foredeck putting it back on – Scottie at the top and Jake at the bottom, it was looking good until they finished hanking it on and realised that in the process they had wrapped the top half of the jib once around the forestay. Just to top it all off, a jib cleat had pulled out of the deck. Bugger!! Let’s go home.