Winter Sprints Run by REACH Youth Sailors

Well, I drew the short straw this week, or the long one, depending on how you look at it. Instead of bobbing around the Harbour in a Laser, I got the honour of sitting on the RIB and spectating. Considering what the breeze was doing, I reckon I was pretty lucky.

We set off with some light rain, but it didn’t last long, although it lingered in the background. The wind decided it would pick up the slack and misbehave instead. From the very first minutes on the water, it was obvious this wasn’t going to be one of those “set and forget” days. The breeze couldn’t decide where it wanted to come from, so it tried everywhere. I started feeling less like a race officer and more like a weather app with 1% accuracy, just making far fetched guesses, and hoping no one noticed.

There was only one person 'over' the whole day who self-nominated and made a mess of their start faster than we could catch up, they did make a comeback, however, so props to them. By race three, we gave up on the rule book and shortened things in a way that World Sailing wouldn’t have approved of, but I would have, had I been racing, and frankly, I wasn’t prepared to wait half an hour for the fleet to go 100m.

All told, it was a decent day out. For the sailors: a test of patience, anger management, and keeping your sense of humour. For the race committee: a chance to stay dry-ish, avoid the misery of drifting backwards on a Laser, and watch everyone chase the breeze and never find it, or at least not enough of it.

On a serious note, thanks to the team this week: Zoe, Elouise, Charlie, Wendell, and Craig. Course changes were dealt with very efficiently and a good job done. Thanks as well to Tuddy, Van, and Steve for their work with the club and our youth program, hopefully after these 2 weeks of running the races for everyone, the youth team appreciates the pains a race committee has to go through every week. We’ll see you on the water next week, I hear there's some time on the tools required beforehand but it's all part of the fun.

by Healy Ryan