While speaking to a nice chap in the Royal Corinthians sailing club he reliably informed me that East coast sailors are some of the best in the UK.
I now know why..
We moved the boat to Burnham-on-Crouch a couple of weeks ago and were looking for a good way to get involved with the local sailing clubs.
Burnham week looked like an great opportunity to meet some new people as well as race Seraphina for the first time. So we got signed up and cracked on!
Prep
There was quite a bit of prep…we don’t race very often and given Seraphina didn’t even have a sail number we’re assuming she has never been raced in her life.
We had to…
– Sail number application (RYA)
– New insurance
– Repair foresail
– Repair forward hatch
– Get and put on sail numbers
– Crew kit (failed to materialise)
– Event sign-up
All in each piece wasn’t too hard, other than the hatch, but altogether quite a lot of work for a couple of weeks. Luckily a friend (Steve) who’s got quite a bit of experience racing onshore/offshore joined us.
Saturday 25th Aug, Day 1 – Relative calm
Perfect first day for everyone. We had good winds on the start and a patch of wind so light that we had to anchor to stop going backwards. We came 3rd out of 4 boats in our class, one retired.
We were a long way behind the pos 1 & 2 from a time perspective but to be honest were happy that we completed before the time limit!
Luckily some clouds came in and pushed us forwards…we managed to avoid the rains… good escape!
Sunday 26th Aug, Day 2 – Serious racing
From talking to other sailors we know that some clubs cancelled racing if the forecast was over 20kts. The east coast sailors don’t give up that easily.
With a forecast of 16-20kts gusting 20kts and building through the afternoon with a good dose of rain, the race was started an hour early to reduce race time in the worse conditions.
The clip above is a quick sample of the return let beating up wind. In retrospect it looks quite calm but it didn’t feel it at the time!
Update – 27/8
Day 3 of racing had so much promise…a lovely full breakfast onboard, a nice lie in.
However, it didn’t last.
Just off the start we noticed that there were a few stitches coming out on the foresail. We tried to repair while sailing but taking the sail down led to more rips.
So we retired and spent the afternoon servicing the sail and reinforcing seams.
