Island Barn Reservoir Sailing Club

Two days of dismal weather preceeding did not bode well for Wednesday sailing and sure enough last night was a stinker. What little wind there was under leaden skies at arrival time had shut off completely to mirror-like ghosting conditions at launch time. Half term brought a smattering of juniors to the Club and it was a surprisingly large merry band of sailors that launched onto a mill pond, not without some hilarity as yours truly proceeded to demonstrate how not to board an RS Vision and received a complete drenching, helped I suspect by some over-enthusiastic "assistance" from a certain H**** P*****. Payback will follow in due course...I'm thinking January.

Volunteer Duty Team Mike Curtis, Paul Wright Anderson and John Magrath did the sensible thing and set a short quadrilateral course in the centre of the reservoir. The slow start was a menagerie of Solos, Visions, Toppers and assorted craft, out of which the Solo of Gareth Griffiths shot off the port end on port and proceeded to drift into the distance. Hot off the blocks in the fast start was Douglas Clow in an RS400 and the aforementioned HP in an RS200, who seemd to ghost up the right of the beat in their own private zephyr.

An interminable amount of drifting ensued, enlived by some rather boisterous singing from an RS Vision and after 3 legs the RO mercifully brought proceedings to a close, upon which the singing Vision girls performed a dance routine in the boat and begged for some capsize fun. It then took a good half an hour before the final Topper made it to the line.

Still, as always, it was nice to be out on the water.

Mike Storey.

Results are here. Thanks to Mike for the report: it looks as if it wasn't a bad evening for your scribe to be elsewhere because it doesn't sound like a Canoe race! Gareth won. No [redacted], Sherlock! Douglas and Ian got 2nd, Harry and Liz 3rd, Nancy Scott 4th - good going in a Topper by the sounds of things, Ben Russell (Solo) 5th and Graham Potter 6th in his Albacore. Corrected times were rather widely spaced! In the Personal handicap there was another unsuprising winner. Clearly Harry has improved some since the results his personal handicap was based on. Well, that is the object of the exercise! I think Liz gets some of the credit too though. Ian/Douglas took 2nd, Gareth 3rd, Ben 4th, Harry Curtis (I think) 5th in a Feva (also good going) and Nancy 6th.