Weston Sailing Club - 11th and 12th May 2013 - Travellers Trophy Event

[BenR]

The sails are good, need to sort out the jib a bit as it is set terribly in the upwind photos of Tim and I.

North kite has a mysterious tear in it from the weekend, so my skills as a seamstress that I developed while in cryogenic detention are going to come in handy.

Sam, Tim and I all had an awesome time. Conditions were, as has been previously said tricky, and it was those whose masts stayed skyward who did the best.

[roland_trim]

Results are up.

http://www.weston.org.uk/site/results/cherub-int14-intcan13.htm

Still not sure they are completely correct. We certainly finished every race.

[phil_kirk]

Photos look great. 

How did the Cherubs perform against the 14's?  I notice that you started together from the photos.

Team Kirk had many options for sailing at the weekend.  Sarah had a byte open at West Oxford SC, I could have done an ent open and Bristol, the cherub open at Weston and an event at Frampton.  Sarah wanted to do the West oxford Byte event at it was one of the closer ones from their callender.  I was on baby sitting duty. The gusty conditions made it enjoyable to watch and sarah led the first lap of the first two races.  She often lost places when the big gusts came in and pitch poled in one of the biggest ones. Alex appeared to enjoy camping and playing in the sandpit. I don't think we would have survived in the Cherub in those conditions.

[roland_trim]

Well done Sarah

[Clive Everest]

It was a bit of a surprise how we seemed to be keeping up with 14s at times.
In the last race the first 2 boats to the weather mark were Cherubs.
The 14s did not seem that much faster downwind either.

They do seem to keep going better when we stop.

There was 1 race where Roger Gilbert lapped us all.

[roland_trim]

More images
https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=1433c0b6911ec4d7&page=browse&resid=1433C0B6911EC4D7!130&parid=1433C0B6911EC4D7!116&authkey=!AvYNhJKqQdYWDTs&Bpub=SDX.SkyDrive&Bsrc=Share&sc=Photos&type=5


These are posted by Tim Roden, he's now working for Wiz at Matrix Composites. He was on the safety rib. The shots really show the variety of conditions over the weekend (the cover shot of us re-rigging the kite on Saturday reminds me there was hail).

[phil_kirk]

That is interesting Clive. When we sailed against them at Weston 3 years ago at the grand slam there was 100 points between us in handicap.  In F2-3 conditions we were very even upwind and down.  As you say they stop less with a  change in conditions.  That will be 2 feet of WL and approx 50Kg of boat and sailors difference. 

Our handicap does not reflect only our straight line speed but also the ability to maintain it through changing conditions and manoeuvres.  I think the RYA PY for cherubs will continue to drop. 

[andy_peters]

That may be true for W/L courses in good Cherub conditions.  However over a range of club courses and breeze strenghts I think the current handicap is OK.  On our day we can win but a round the cans course or a lighter breeze then other less extreme boats stuff us on 920.  Anyway we are doing our bit for PY feedback by doing some Wednesday evening races at QMSC

[andy_peters]

Our last three results show the difficulty of handicapping a cherub

Race 1 - medium wind strength W/L - we win by 4 minutes on corrected time (mixed fleet of 35ish)
Race 2 - lightish wind P course - cracking start and first round windward mark, wind then eases to 'sub-optimal'  result 8th out of 30ish
Race 3 - light wind triangle - poor start and very sub optimal winds throughout.  24th of 30ish.  Only boats behind were complete numpties or fellow trapeze boats (musto and 700's)

[Graham Bridle]

We have the same experience Andy, at Brightlingsea where we have to start in a shifty creek, return there for a turning lap marker and with strong tides we find we wither win by up to 10 minutes, or lose by up to 10 minutes usually depending on the wind and tide direction (long beat with the tide = good, long beat against the tide = bad). We race against the B14 National Champion and a few fair to good merlins, ditto fireballs, lasers etc along with some cats who are equally unpredictable.

We still sail off 920 which I think is on the generous side, I did offer to reduce it to 900 but was told that was the race committees decision, not mine, fair enough !

So I think its down to where you sail, winward leeward and we'll be hammered, round the cans maybe not so much, a good advert for individual clubs setting their own PY.

A wise man once told me - don't winge about your PY, just smile and sail to it - wise words indeed