Start-of-Season at Great Yarmouth & Gorleston Sailing Club

The wind was off Scandinavia, bringing a bit of a chill, but its strength was right and the sky was bright, so a hardy but keen fleet of craft set out onto the North Sea for Great Yarmouth + Gorleston Sailing Club’s Start-of-Season event.

Three races followed and were fairly dominated by the slowest double-hander, the Falat’s Fireball. With leading boats over the water clocking about 35-minutes of racing, this allowed recuperation and warm-up time for numb fingers. Added to this the average-lap system of scoring allowed back-markers to sail only 3-laps instead of the 4 that the majority completed, ensured minimal waiting time for subsequent starts.

Off a short start-line race-team Dick Rowe and Kate Dulieu set an excellent beat on an initial slack tide, though it was noticeable as time progressed and the ebb-current set in that this leg became increasingly port-tack biased. With 1m wave-heights there were some tremendous downwind surfing opportunities, and even upwind the Fireball was seen occasionally to take-off and ‘fly’ over wave-tops.

The Fireball excelled to windward and led at the windward mark on 11 out-of the 12 occasions. Downwind however, asymmetrics took over, also in later races they gybed towards slack-tide to improve their advantage, while conventional down-winders had to rely on surfing opportunities to take them very deep with advantage; there was a most useful transit looking at a shore-groyne from the top mark to leeward gate, that enabled a clear gauge on downwind-track progress.

The first race finished with two RS400s (Di Holmes & Pete Matthews) separated by 8-seconds, however they were to be split on handicap by an RS500 (Tamsin Butcher 3rd) and the Fireball that shared first place. Second race saw the leading RS400s separated by 3-seconds after some desperately aggressive reaching and gybing on Martin Browne’s part to come through from his usual relaxed start, however this time a different RS500 popped into the placings (John Symonds 2nd) behind the Fireball.

Clear overall winners discarding a (shared-) 1st place was the Falat Fireball; 2nd equally clearly RS400 (Holmes); the next 5 places separated by 4-points showing how close the racing had actually been; most meritorious performance probably by the Contender of Phil Alison in completing all races comfortably in most trying and lumpy conditions, and safe launch/recovery in confused surf.