IOM Mid Week Handicap

It was a beautiful sunny blue sky day, 23 degrees but it felt warmer, and the morning presented a light but persistent WSW of about 3 – 5 knots. We were all expecting a sea-breeze to fill in early but it didn’t arrive until after lunch so until then we did struggle a bit to set a good course. 

In the morning the fleet was often condensed when the backmarkers were swept forward when a good gust filled in behind them which led to some tricky mark roundings with boats often stacked 6 or more wide. 
While situations like this will often lead to contact between boats and sometimes altercations between skippers it is important to minimise disagreement and argument. This can be done by keeping a greater distance between boats, talking to other skippers ahead of an incident, making clear calls when you have right of way and, if there is an incident then limiting discourse to ‘sail number’ protests ‘sail number’. We do try to want to keep Wednesdays as a more casual social sail but the best way to do this is to be careful, obliging and do penalties. 

The afternoon sea breeze always makes for good sailing and there was some great racing and some close finishes today. The podium was well shared around too with most skippers finding it at some stage. Best today was Andrew Wardrop, four trips to the podium and a good 6 points ahead of the next skipper. But the next 7 skippers were only separated by 5 points showing how close these events are becoming. Jammy Jones took second place with consistent results. Phil Jackman was third and his day featured a really well fought out win in race #4.

Coming up:

Sunday: Marblehead scratch racing at Montrose (1:00 button press)

Wednesday: IOM handicap racing at Risdon Brook Dam (11:00 button press)

Shorty
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