IOM Summer Series Round 2

A great turnout of fourteen sailors today.

A fantastic day, with a light breeze to start with, although it made it hard on Les to set a good start for the first few races.

We got nine races in, which was a good effort with the amount of yachts on the water. About half way through, the breeze stiffened a bit from the south, and a number of sailors elected to use a yacht recovery time to change to B rig.

Not really sure who won out of the rig change, as the A's and B's were well and truly mixed through the fleet. 

Stu Dawes broke out of the blocks early, with a win with his home built Woodie Goth. Pretty impressive effort with the quality field today.

Today belonged to Mat Gray, sailing his Venti for the second time. Beautiful yacht and sailed exptremely well. Very impressive with a 4th being his worst counted score on his way to just 13 points from the nine races.

Lisa Blackwood took out second place, just two points behind Mat. Another very skilful and consistent day, given the numbers on the water.

Mike Hickman rounded out the top three, three points further behind, on 18. Just goes to show what happens with a good mix of talent and clean sailing.

Wednesday is our regular IOM Handicap, from 10am, with the John Emms Memorial (RM) next Sunday. We only have two entries in so far, so if you are intending on sailing, please get the entry in as soon as possible. Link to RBRYC Ranking Events page.

The committee have spoken about a rankings system within the club, for use with handicapping our scratch day races. It has come about with the intent on encouraging those skippers that aren't necessarily at the pointy end of the field as something to encourage their performance on the day. The basic premise is to rank the competitors on any particular day from 1 to however many competitors there are, and then their handicap score is the difference between their finishing place and their handicap rank on the day. We hope this will encourage those who don't realistically expect to be int he first few places on a sail day. I have a computer whiz sorting out a nice spreadsheet that will do all the rankings for us, and am happy to explain the method behind the rankings to anyone that wishes to know. This will be in place within a few weeks hopefully.

There has also been some interest in the changes to the Rules of Sailing this year, and some rules have been applied at club level already. Interestingly, I saw a post on Facebook from Glenn Dawson, a member of the World Sailing Appendix E Radio Sailing Racing Rules working party, which explains one of the rules that I completely welcomed - and misunderstood, in regards to taking a penalty and gaining an advantage. Glenn explains it very well over at the QRYA site. I encourage everyone to spend five minutes reading Glenn's words as it explains the rule very well, and can also correct those of us who had the same incorrect understanding that I had.