IOM Mid Week Handicap

​The thick cloud at the dam this morning quickly burnt off to give us a lovely sunny day with a fairly steady southerly wind of about 5 knots and particularly smooth sailing conditions.

A rigs were the order of the day and a figure eight course was set around buoys 4-3-8 and 7.
Today’s winner was Lisa Blackwood whose result sheet included a couple of wins with a boat commandeered from Ricky! (The two wins in races 7 and 8 using boat 47 were credited to Lisa rather than Ricky.) Well sailed Lisa!

Second place was decided after count-back with John Murrell taking the position from John Cole-Cook  John Murrell is showing that he is hard to catch if he gets away at the start.

John Cole-Cook’s third place was particularly impressive as he featured in the placings last week but this week he did it from the maximum starting handicap of 70.  John told me that he has been working on tuning the Venti for boat-speed in light conditions and today was a good test.

Also worthy of congratulations today is Martin Svensen who is showing genuine improvement every time he sails and this week scoring his first race win in the final race of the day.

It is too early to comment on whether the changes to the handicap system are working but today we did see race winners from each end and the middle of the handicap range. In addition to this 16 out of the 17 skippers reached the podium at least once. Both are good signs.

Next Wednesday will be DF95 handicap racing at the dam and Sunday’s racing will be the Southern IOM Championship at Montrose. All the best to those skippers who have entered for this event.

John Hall mentioned to me that there have been some alterations made to upcoming fixtures in our race calendar so please consult the website calendar for updated information.

John S