We got munched!
Nice shot! Glad they caught our one moment of glory. Hopefully there arn't any others of us as I am likely to be on the cb!
That is us crossing World Youth Champ James Peters (773) off the start line, he pulled out a big lead on all the other 29ers (and us) and went on to win the race. We had the same start as the 29ers and fancied going right with the added advantage of sailing our own lane away from them and the benefit of a little port bias.
The wind was over 20kn for the race which left us a bit slow being over powered and also struggling on boat handling, particularly getting thru the wind cleanly on tacks in chop. We were pretty messy and had plenty of swims. We had interesting cat & mouse with Debbie and Hoppy who had started late in their Fireball. We would charge past them, splot, Fireball cruise by, repeat....
Had a bit of a situation with the Winner bank when sailing a high angle out of the windward mark. We ploughed a 12'' grove (cb as gauge) thru the shingle in a wave trough twinning with the kite. Inside Chichester harbour can be anything but flat at high tide, especially when it starts ebbing into a SWer! We kept the boat going but with the cb at a unhealthily raked angle we retired.
Interesting with the 29er though. We would normally hope to beat them but now we see that over a certain windstrength they can continue sailing hard after we start to struggle with more power than we need.
I was coaching K6s on the harbour today (Sunday). It was a lovelly sunny 12-15kn. Maybe next year...
Ratface retired with broken cb.
I guess if there were 143 entries a lot of DNFs have been left off the results.
