Island Barn Reservoir Sailing Club

Here are the "Round the Island" results. As you should all no we are closed on Sunday due to the damned cycling event, so on the Saturday we run a special. No races as such, instead all comers are timed ldoing laps of the reservoir leaving all racing marks to port. Best times, both on standard and club personal handicaps, win. We don't do prizes for the fastest boat unhandicapped: much to the regret of the owner of the fastest boat round a circular course in the club - ie me... In fact the canoe was unavailable this year as its being rejibbed. The disintegrating old one is with the salmaker as a pattern.

Not much point in decribing the course in detail: the north bank was kinda beat come fetchy, the west bank was also kinda fetchy, the south bank was reachy and seemed very sheltered and the east bank was very deep reaching. The wind was really unsteady: lot of thermals about. Funny actually, watching the lake before the start opened I suggested that the gust pattern appearing on the lake looked a lot like a thermal drifting across, and Gareth noted that Paul Playle comments that you can always spot thermals because there'll be birds circling in them. We looked up, and sure enough, a lone seagull was gliding in desultory circles. gaining height with no visible effort...

It was pretty light early on, full of holes and shifty, but it steadied up and the wind increased a bit after lunch. You can see from the results that the best times were mostly set later on. There were probably over 50 runs attempted, but not all were completed.

Winners: 1, 2 3 with standard handicaps were John Oldham, Gareth Griffiths and Kyo Wong. We decided that the club Visions, weren't eligible for personal handicap prizes as we didn't actually have any data on the sailors, and we also declared the top 3 with standard handicaps ineligible. So the top three were Peter Cruise, John Doyle and Ben Sharp. See Gareth for a bottle chaps.

(*) We think this one was not a lap, just a long changeovber between crews.