Puddleduck Vineyard Racing 15/10/24 DF95

[Shorty]

Seventeen starters for todays DF95 sail at Puddleduck! I think that this might have set a record for starters on a DF95 day! No surprise though as it was pretty much a perfect day for racing – sunny and with a North to North East breeze of 2 – 6 knots. We hardly ever get anything with an Easterly slant to it at Puddleduck but this breeze made for good course setting and good racing on the dam.

Bodge and Gadget arrived early and did some work cleaning the buoys. Our thanks to you both. This job is quite important, remembering that we are guests at Puddleduck, we need to make sure that our equipment is well maintained and tidy. It wasn’t Bodge’s only dinghy trip today either as he had to do a couple of rescues including his own boat which he forgot to turn on!

Also big thank you to Ricky Price who took on the PRO’s chair. Some of the finishes today were tight. There was a short down-wind leg to the finish line and a dead patch at the last buoy and so often boats would bank up at the mark before a gust would carry them to the finish line in a bunch leaving Ricky to sort out the order.

Generally sailing was pretty orderly today but I do feel that as the fleet grows maintaining good fair sailing could be difficult if we are too lax. Some things that we should all be doing to help in this regard are:

• Refresh ourselves on the basic rules of sailing.
• Avoid close encounters with other boats. (This will actually improve your own boat speed too.)
• If you have right-of-way then call it aloud to alert the other skipper before an incident occurs.
• If a breech of rules has caused a collision then the skipper with right-of-way should ask the offending skipper for a penalty turn. I do think that ‘kind-heartedly’ letting skippers off will actually lead to less enjoyable sailing for all in the long run.

In the overall standings there were three tied positions and lots of close calls. Jammy Jones took out third place with two race wins in his mix. First and second were tied with Lisa Blackwood winning the day on count-back from Mat Gray. Congratulations Jammy, Mat and Lisa. It was particularly good to see Mat on the water today as it was easy to see the pain he was enduring and the effort he was making just to sail.

But – what a beautiful day to be radio sailing!

Shorty

[Gadget]

Well written report Shorty. You summed the day up nicely 👍

Big appologies for lack of hat cam video today ☹️

I forgot to swap the camera battery after race five. In the process of the camera turning off late in the morning and me pressing buttons wondering what was going on, somehow it wiped the SD card. I even tried to recover deleted files off the card with no success.

It would have been good to view those close finishes you mention.

[Flash]

I’d like to thank Trout for lending me his boat for the day.

I’d like to thank Gadget for not having footage today – some of my sailing wasn’t pretty, and is better left unrecorded 🙂

[Trout]

It was a pleasure Flash. sensational fleet of 95’s, well done Lisa and Mat – welcome back to the Duck!

[Author]

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