Island Barn Reservoir Sailing Club

22/1

Apologies for no news last week – I’ll stretch the little grey cells and try to remember what happened...

The results were:

Gareth

Mike L

Paul

Peter C

Mervyn

Roy

Dave C

Frank

I can’t remember much about the race from that long ago, but I do recall the middle and back of the fleet being very close with Dave C just taking Frank at the end. In the Back to Back Paul recorded his first win of the winter in the second race.

This week we were thin on the water but very much in evidence at the club.  Paul and I are doing an RYA Dinghy Instructors course (along with Carl, Nick Mason, and Dave Simpson) aiming to get a greater depth of ‘official’ instructors in the club.  At the same time Mark, Mervyn and Peter H were all on duty. On the water Tony P had a sail-over in some testing conditions. 

On the instructor course we were sailing all weekend and in the strongest winds on Saturday we had a reefed Feva main on the Vision – nearest thing to a B plan sail that we could find for the Vision that doesn’t have the second reefing point. There’s a lot of good background on the Instructor course - taking apart something like tacking into each separate movement and then putting it back together helps you understand what you really do. Similarly boat balance – there’s nothing quite like doing rudderless sailing in force 5 for getting an appreciation of how good sail balance and weight distribution can really help drive the boat. Every time we use the rudder we are applying a brake. If we can use the sail and balance to avoid fighting the boat we can seem to go much faster. (It’s often more about not slowing down than actually going faster.)

On a different subject we are having a change this year because the club has more Open Meetings – instead of us (Solos) just swapping open meeting duties with the lasers we will be doing the RS200’s this year. Please note the date:  17 March – still officially in ‘Winter’ so we don’t take a Saturday out of the summer program. We also plan to allow smaller open meetings to run at the same time as club racing to avoid taking too many Saturdays out of the program. There’s plenty of room for club racing to work alongside a 10-15 boat open meeting. Are you available on March 17 to help run the RS200 Open Meeting. (Mike Jones has already volunteered to do RO)

This weekend Paul and I will still be on the instructors course. There will be a Topper Open meeting running IN PARALLEL with club racing on Sunday.  The clubhouse will be busy but there is plenty of water for both.  Mike Jones is on duty and intends to set two courses one for the Toppers and one for Club  Racing with as few marks in common as possible. This is a chance to show an Island Barn welcome to lots of parents of Topper sailors.

On the subject of instructing / coaching I have been talking to Jim Hunt about arranging a Solo Coaching day in the spring – probably concentrating a bit on sail controls and sail settings. I’m thinking that a Saturday in March or April but starting to struggle to find dates that don’t clash with anything that we might want to go to (local open) or he might want to go to. At the moment the best bet looks like 3 Mar or 24 Mar (because I’m away on the 10/11 weekend) and then we are starting to get into Open Meeting season. If I can get Jim down, how many of you are interested and any preference on dates (I haven’t checked that date with him yet).

Gareth

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