Fellow sailors,
Last week the ODOM’s & Soling 50’s opened their season with a bang but this week the bar was definitely raised by the DF 95’s & IOM’s! 21 DF 95’s and 11 IOM’s!
Craig Mackey certainly had his hands full as RD for the DF 95’s but he managed extremely well. Medium courses were the call for the day with the last heat being a long course finishing at the windward mark.
With 21 boats on the line, things did get a little congested at times and in general everyone played rather nicely together. BUT, with so many boats, the fight to not get buried in the second row saw several general recalls. Apparently there’s a lot of hair triggers fitted to numerous transmitters! :O
The RD was heard commenting that some skippers were just like naughty 4th graders! 🙂 Principal Mackey sure did make it clear that there would be none of that! No cane but out came the ‘Black Flag Rule’ with a total of 4 boats getting sent to the naughty corner between two races. I believe that may be an Argonauts record!
It was obvious that Jess Atkinson’s tuning clinic a couple of weeks ago has lifted the performance of the fleet in general with some extremely close racing.
It was great to see a few new faces and also to welcome some sailors back.
Enter the IOM’s with Kerim Baran doing a great job looking after RD duties for this quality fleet who didn’t seem to have the ’naughty kids’ in the mix? Competition in this fleet was super tight with some very interesting first mark rounding’s, with plenty of ducking and weaving. This didn’t change much around the entire race track with plenty of entertainment for the ‘peanut gallery’.
Congrats. to the place getters and to everyone who came out to the pond to ‘do what we do’. If the first two weekends of racing are a sign of what’s to come ahead in the season it’s going to be one Krakka of a year!
Thanks also to Bill Bridge, David Stong and Chris Staiger for pulling the buoys and packing away the dinghy.
Next week is practice day so ‘bring what ya got!’
See you at the pond! 🙂
Regards, Chris
We all send best wishes for a speedy and healthy recovery to Kim. We miss you on the pond!
