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...Cruiser Racing |
Sooper Trooper Gybe Loops Steel Can for Narrow
Victory
Len Nolan Cup Series, Race 2, 24 May 2009
On
Bank Holiday Monday it was the turn of the cruisers to go to sea
in bright sunshine for the second race of the club’s Len Nolan
Cup series.
Racing Secretary Emma Keen laid a course that initially took the fleet from the harbour entrance west, down tide to West, before returning eastwards back into the tide past the harbour to Steel Can. In the pre-start someone (Nicola!) dropped the GPS over the side of Dedicated Dancer and despite a search it could not be found.
The fleet started in a NE wind and tacked towards West. On the beat, Dedicated Dancer did a rapid 360 to fish for and eventually recover their GPS—how’s that for good luck?—but it did cost them time. As the leaders rounded West and put up spinnakers to plug up-tide, the wind stuttered and died, making the fleet concertina close to the mark. The wind then backed due south as the sea breeze set in. The race became a close spinnaker reach along the shore and into the tide, and was thankfully shortened at Steel Ca
n.Spinnaker reaching up to Steel Can on a tight starboard tack, tacking round it to starboard and spinnaker reaching away from it on port presented some challenging crew work at the mark. Sooper Trooper decided to sail past, gybe round with the spinnaker up and reach back past—just managing to avoid the mark after the gybe in th
e dying wind. A complicated manoeuvre but it seemed to work because when the handicaps were worked out, the race winner—by just 10 seconds in a race of more than 2 hours—was Richard Dobson in Sooper Trooper.