Island Barn Reservoir Sailing Club

Another windy evening, but unusually an easterly. Kind of an odd course, which was long beat, shortish reach across the top, moderate length run down to the middle, fetch across to the clubhouse a moderate length deep reach down and a rather shy reach back to the start. Got that? Well if you did you're doing better than at least one competitor who had trouble distinguishing an X from a D and sailed a good way extra on one lap...

I recall Ben Jones showing well early on in the Lasers, but with Kevin Pearson close behind and in a Radial. Mike Curtis got clear of the fleet early and sailed the vast majority of the race in clear air. There were plenty of alarums and excursions: the breeze was coming through at pushing 20 knots at times, but at other times it was under 10...

One thing I did notice: I took some photos from dead downwind of F, which people were gybing round, and an awful lot of boats weren't gybing until right round on a reach rather than whilst they were still dead downwind, and that was a cause of quite a few rocky moments and some worse. Its good to do the gybe whilst you are dead downwind, and this is especially true in a two hander where I believe the forward hand should throw the boom across as soon as it will go, and not wait until the wind decides to push it.

Here's the results. Good results for some of the younger competitors, and not only in the personal handicap. Kyo Wong's 5th ahead of Gareth Griffiths was a very good result indeed.

Series wise it looks very open, with Paul Playle taking a narrow lead from Mike Curtis. Don't forget that I haven't combined results from separate classes, so, for example, Kevin Pearson is actually on 9 points, not 10, and Gareth's results from three classes put him at around 12.5 points..

Rather disappointed with the photos I took, I thought the light might be interesting with the unusual wind direction, but most were very unspecial. Here are a handful that might amuse though.

8 photographs

On wildlife notes, I see that the Coots have chosen what we used to call the Enterprise ramp to nest on which is a bit more convenient for us than the main jetty, and there's also a family of Egyptian Geese - which are really more ducks than geese...