SENIORS RACE 6 April 2019

An event which we always enjoy, albeit numbers were really down. Sieger Yolo's trusty and long running crew member was delegated as skipper.

Getting a good start but light fickle conditions that followed, Sieger held his own, nice rounding at Paarden Island and managed to catch the windline as the SE started to push through. eventually caught in a hole with those behind catching the breeze. With a couple of good manouveres to avoid all collisions with those that don't abide by the riles at the leeward mark. Around the mark and then some really nice sailing... later in the race while approaching the weather mark on Starboard a Port tacker forced Yolo to tack in order to avoid a collision... later this same boat on the downwind caught up and overlapped to weather, in order to clear air Yolo started to head up.. but this boat was adamant, their overlap gave them rights.. no amount of telling them that it is a simple case of they are the weather boat and needed to keep clean made any sense to them. Dale even offered them to come to the boat afterwards to go through a rule book together. As this was a fun race, the protest flag was below.. In future the flag will be ready and deployed.. fun race or not... It is not fair to stand down, purely because there would have been a collision.

Well done to Sieger on sailing a good race. Unfortunately there was another hole at the finish line and we ended up wrong side of it... Still coming in 19th overall and 5th in age category(over 70).

Aboard were: Sieger, Dale, Ian, Antonio

Double Handed Race 30th March 2019

Possibly the start of the season which had the potential of allowing Yolo to pull a nice distance ahead... but soon after the start there was commercial shipping where tugs were about to begin pilotage on a ship.. although we could have cleared it, we fell in line with the Colreg rules and bore away and had to sail around it, putting us behind out competition.(Begs the question, should we be racing along shipping lanes) notwithstanding this, it gave us the challenge to try and make up the distance.. we worked the upwind leg, looking for puffs and shifts, round the weather mark second and a few seconds ahead of Tin Tin.. a nice reach in light conditions with us making initial ground till Tin Tin got going which had them closing the gap... Landfall was the leeward mark which was in fog.. with us neck and neck with Ballyhoo, with us getting the inside and gybing the kite.. they opted not to kite. Te next leg was very tight and mostly in the fog.. with the boat fully powered up, going neck and neck with Ballyhoo, Tin Tin struggled to hold a lane and lost out.. with Yolo finishing a few seconds behind the first boat an first by a comfortable margin under handicap. Aboard were: Dale and Ian.