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Anniversary Handicap June

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  • The June edition started off on a rather chilly June day with a rather chilly northerly. There was plenty of cumulus up above the boundary later and a very generous quantity of sometimes challenging gusts and loads of shifts. It was pretty similar to the previous Wednesday evening, but less extreme. It warmed up considerably during the day, and ended up with a very pleasant afternoon, but that's another story... Anyway, the track, as I remember, was a long beat, a somewhat one sided long run towards the other end of the lake, a short shy reach followed by a *very* short beat, and then a longish reach back to the start. It sounds like quite a high speed track when written down like that , but somehow it didn't quite work like that - everyone got to have a bit of a blast at times, but there was little sustained high speed sailing.

     

    Peter Curtis got to the top mark first from the fast start, with an inside overlap on your scribe and Mike Storey's National well in attendance too. For some reason this wasn't one of my better races for spotting what was going on: too many handling errors in the boat perhaps... Peter managed to keep his head in front pretty much all the way round. The front end of the fast fleet seemed to lap the tail end of the slow fleet (starting two minutes later for this series) awfully quickly and I gained the impression - and the results seem to bear me out - that something went badly wrong for their first lap - the wind not coming when they needed it perhaps... This was something of a feature of the race, especially the long beat: just about everyone, even Peter, seemed to get stuck with no wind or big headers from time to time on that leg. Easily the star of the slow fleet was George Woolhouse in his Topper - he managed to avoid getting lapped by Peter and was ahead of several Solos on the water, which wants a bit of doing in a Topper in any conditions, let along something quite as spiteful as this day could be...

     

    Results: well Peter won by quite a margin. No doubt clear air almost all the way round the track didin't do any harm either, but I was rather better placed to watch his sailing than I might have preferred and he was certainly handling the tricky little 300 very nicely in the conditions. Mike Storey, in his N12 pipped Rob Pettit's Laser for third place, and Rob was followed by four more Lasers, Brian Greenaway, Tony Butler & Stephen Day  being the three (in that order) who made the top 6 and the namecheck. These were all from the first start, George Woolhouse in 8th being the first from the slow fleet start: only two others from that start making the top 15.

    Of course we run the personal handicap scoring alongside for this series, and George won this handily. 2nd was Ian Hamilton in a Topaz(=Topper) Xenon, followed by Dave Thorpe in a Solo, then Greenaway and Butler scoring the same places as the scratch race, and Dan Hemmant, also in a Laser, rounding off the top 6.

    With three races gone we have the start of a series. I've scored it with one discard, which isn't technically correct according to the SIs, but gives a better picture than 1 to count from 3... The results are here. In the main scoring system Gareth Griffiths (Solo) is just leading from Peter Curtis and Rob Pettit, who are on equal points. John Leheup (Laser) is a clear 4th, with Brian Greenaway and George Woolhouse 5th and 6th. Under the personal handicap (really an improvers trophy since the handicaps are based on the previous year's results) George is leading on tiebreak from Ian Hamilton. Brian Greenaway is 3rd and somewhat to his suprise your scribe is 4th with the crazy Canoe. Gareth Griffiths is 5th, but ineligible for prizes, whilst 6th is currently held by the evergreen octagenarian Solo sailing Frank Beanland.

     

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