Ok, you all asked for it. Just something I spewed out onto the machine. Willy is quite busy at the moment but might add his comment as well but you should get the idea....
7 boats in total made it to Kurnell in Sydney for the NSW F16hp State Titles on the 22nd and 23rd of February. 3 boats from Sydney, 2 from Canberra, 1 from Newcastle and 1 making the 10 hour trip from Bendigo. All boats were Taipan F16s.
The crews were as follows:
035 Bullet – Daniel Van Kerchof and Annaliese Byrne
099 Kinetic – James Cole and Jen Stalker
105 Two Fang Tango – Kez Stevens and Steve Medwell
129 Alphabet Soup – Andrew Collins and Kingsley Pursch
147 Wet Willy – Andrew Williams and Petra Eggl
166 Fully Blown – Michael Cook and Nathan Van Kerchof
260 n/a – Liam? Goodall and Brett Goodall
The race format was to have one race in the morning and then two back to back in the afternoon on Saturday and two back to back on the Sunday morning.
Race 1 started in a bit under 10 knots with crews double trapezing most of the time upwind. Dan and Annaliese missed the start having only received the spinnaker kit on the morning of the regatta they were still setting things up – plus, Dan’s lazy
. The breeze was quite shifty coming from the south and this being Willy’s home club he showed the rest of the fleet where to go. The class format had the F16hp’s starting with the Tornado’s and an A Class instead of the F18s so it was a little hard to judge our speed differential.
Race 2 made it easier though with Michael Cook (Cookie) romping in a victory and actually beating some of the Nacra F18s around the course after they started 5 minutes ahead of us! Dan made it onto the water and Annaliese showed us why she’s a super crew with a 2nd place in her first sail with a kite.
Race 3 saw Cookie’s halyard pully seize relegating him to running standard for just about the whole race. The breeze had picked up slightly to near 15kts at times which made for some fun rides though we were all still experimenting with crews and skippers on and off trapeze when the kites were up. If we thought the racing was fun on the Saturday though , none of us were really prepared for how close things were at the top on Sunday....
The wind had picked up fairly significantly for the Sunday morning as rain and wind squalls moved across the course. There were times though where the wind dropped down near 10 kots though. Kingsley and I did a rather spectacular stack straight over the front on the way to the start line as we had just set the kite which provided amusement for the rest of the fleet as well as the start boat.
We picked ourselves up and the fluro orange jib of Alphabet Soup led the fleet around the course for race four with second to Cookie after fixing his halyard from the day before.
The last race was just awesome. Four boats absolutely smokin’ around the course in about 18knots all within 50 metres of each other. Mark roundings, cross tacks, everything was close. All four boats led the race at one point and there were enough boats in the group that you couldn’t afford to cover one boat or the other two would sneak by. As we were sailing around I thought to myself that you only get this close racing in really big fleets when there are boats all around you anyway. The kite drops at the gate bottom mark were.... um..... interesting shall we say.
The final results show Willy taking the title by only one point and two tiebreaks in the rest of the results!
One interesting note was that Helen Sharrock was on the start boat and was timing us around the course and noting our deltas with the F18s. In the decent breeze around 15-18kts we were pulling back only up to 30 seconds per lap on them but when the breeze died out the deltas were more like a minute to a minute and a half! Just an interesting side point.
