Sailing Magazine
Graeme Willcox reports:
“We woke up this morning to a thunder storm which eventually cleared up to leave little wind. The FX fleet were up first and were sent out after an hour postponement. We ended up sitting around on shore until about 14h30 when the D flag went up. We launched early and sailed out to the line.
As the only boat in the fleet without a coach boat to tow us out, we arrived at the start as the Orange flag went up (7 minutes to the start) so we did a quick line and beat check and got on the line for the start.
First try was a general recall with the tide pushing us up to the boat end of the line. We got off on the second attempt with a nice gap to leeward and good speed. We held the lane until we wanted to tack and found a clear port lane and made our way up to the mark. After a few boats tacked onto us near the weather mark we rounded mid-fleet and gybe hoisted and headed down the left of the run. With less tide to sail into compared to the right and the same pressure we made good ground on those to the right of us and rounded well at the gate. After a solid second lap we crossed the finish line in ninth position. The over night leaders from Croatia picked up a black flag which bumped us up to 8th.
The second race got under way on the second attempt. At 2 seconds to go we had a boat barge in above – and they incidentally were early and picked up a black flag. But this did mess our start up and we had to bail out early. After making our way around the top mark in mid-fleet we round the leeward gate heading for the left with the favourable tide. We had a good downwind to pick up a 22nd to finish off the day.
Getting back to the shore at 19h30 we found we have moved up the score board to 46th overall.
We are up first tomorrow and the forecast is for 10-15 from the SE, so we are looking forward to stretching our legs a bit in some more breeze.
