Warsash
Spring Series 3 – Report from With Alacrity – 28 March 2010
No race report last week as kind of hard to be
insightful when the wind is quite so light and fickle. Plus, to be honest, we
felt faintly embarrassed at our smash and grab raid on the results as I can’t
really explain how we went from 5th/6th to 1st around the
final leeward mark. Anyway, guess that is sailboat racing - if it was easy &
predictable it wouldn’t be so much fun!
This Sunday was a fantastic day on the water as the
Spring Series served up another day of most un-March like weather – this time
12-15 knots with the odd patch of drizzle but a lot less chilly than it should
be at this time of year. Must admit,
though I voted for the Sigma 38s to sail in IRC rather than a separate class, I
have been really struggling to get to grips with the starts in such a big fleet.
On Sunday we had 30 boats on the start line, almost twice the number of any
other class. Our plan was to start towards the left of the line to be able to
sail into the deep water earlier and pick up the favourable windward going
current. Instead we found ourselves by the committee boat on the right of the
start line working hard to avoid collisions and keep some semblance of clear
air. After the gun we had Starspray sail over us and
decided to tack off to clear our air, which didn’t work as well as we hoped and
by the time we were heading back out on starboard to the deep water we knew we
had not done well.
Light, at the other end of the line got a great start
and were in imperious form to sail to a convincing win. At the first cross it
was clear quite how expensive our start had been as they crossed more than a
quarter mile ahead along with Marta, and quite a few other Sigma 38s ahead of
us. We worked hard to ease ourselves
back up the fleet around an interesting course which included a tight spinnaker
leg along with a few shorter 0.6 mile legs to keep us on our toes. We had some
tight battles with Rapscallion (who seem to be always ready to pounce on any
mistake), Kindred Spirit who were sailing a fantastic race until some spinnaker
problems let us past and finally Marta who were sailing fast and should have
hung onto 2nd place but for an untidy last spinnaker leg that let us
slip through at the final rounding mark.
By the finish we had made little or no inroads into Light’s lead but
happy to nick 2nd place to keep the series interesting.
Being a bit anal-ytical and
this being the halfway point in the series, thought it would be interesting to
check out some statistics. Light’s win today means we have 3 different boats
winning one of the first three races. On Sunday Sigma 38s were the largest
class outside of the SB3s, making up one third of IRC 3 which in turn was 58%
bigger than the next largest class. Really quite amazing, this should be a
great season if we can build on this as a class. Even better that Light proved
on Sunday that we have every chance of doing well on handicap if we sail well.
The Spring Series is on a break now before returning
for part 2 after Easter. With Alacrity will be spending the Easter weekend
doing the first offshore races of the season and look forward to catching up
with anyone else going to Cherbourg. On
Saturday No Fear & With Alacrity sailed the first JOG inshore race of the
season and had a great 3 hour race up to Lymington
and back – if anyone doesn’t fancy the offshore races I can highly recommend
making a weekend of it and doing one of the shorter JOG inshore races on a
Saturday before the Spring series, next one is the Nab Tower race on 17th
April !