Dear All,
This Marblehead World Championship 2018 was a marvellous event and huge thanks have to go to the full-size sailing club Segelverein -Biblis E.V and their hard-working and welcoming members who gave up their own sailing to create this event, which was instigated by Henning Faas, who is well known to GMYC members by his visits to our club.
The weather was superb with hot sun every day, which drove competitors and supporters alike to head for the shade if possible, as shown in the first two photos. Apart from the Tuesday and last day, Friday, there was very little wind and a lot of time on Wednesday and Thursday mornings was spent just waiting for the breeze to fill in.
There were lots of abandoned races as a result of wind speed and direction not being steady enough for long enough to complete a heat. However these periods of waiting were great for putting the world of model yachting to rights and making new friends. In my particular case such a friendship was created out of a rather embarrassing collision between UP and the top Russian, sailing Phil Holliday’s old QUARK, when we were close to the finishing line. This was quite unnecessary as we were both in a promotion position. Fortunately he got redress as I was on port.
As this event was the pinnacle of what is regarded as the Formula One class of radio sailing, the standard of boats, rigs and sails was superb, but it was the skippers who made the difference between boats of the same design.
No doubt you will have seen the results on the 2018 World Championship website, with Peter on the podium in third place behind Christophe Boinault and Brad Gibson on top, both sailing GRUNGEs. The Brits did well with four in the top six with Chris Harris sailing Nigel Winkley’s NIOUTRAM brilliantly and Graham Bantock in 6th.  Rob Vice did well and was delighted to pull himself up to 24th by the end of the week, unlike myself as the third member of the Guildford team, who had an embarrassingly poor event just going down from C heat to E heat and then not being able to get out until the last day when I climbed to B heat, but could go no further as we had run out of time and race 13 was abandoned. I was not alone as Martin Roberts had the same problem, only managing to get out of E on Thursday.
There was a great variety of rigs on show with only a few conventional A rigs, mainly beautiful ones on Walicki boats. In particular, there were several with strut attached to the mast a foot or so above the jib boom to hold the clew down in lieu of an offset pivot.
There were a great variety of fin constructions with bulb weights all looking on the light side. Christophe Boinault’s GRUNGE looked very light with obvious overhangs and like Peter his ballast was 3.2 kg as opposed to Brad’s 3.35 kg. Christophe won the first three races in very impressive style, but suffered a bit when the wind got to the top of A rig.
Peter reckoned that I was unlucky having two lots of weed, given two penalty turns by an umpire who had not seen that I was in the right, a battery failure and by a three times delayed start after which the wind died when I was in B rig.
My performance was not impressive, but the UP was and I was delighted that Peter got on the podium making all the effort of creating a new design well worthwhile, after his previous WC’s had resulted in lots of fourth places.
The Guildford Team camped and this was a great success and Oliver and Nathan had an absolutely marvellous time with the Ballington girls, lots of swimming both at the club and the campsite, where there was a real beach down to the water. The only downside was on Thursday night, when there was an almighty thunderstorm, sheet lightning, strong winds and heavy rain. Fortunately our two tents survived, but the open marquee alongside the clubhouse and you can see in first photograph was completely wrecked.
On the way back to catch the Eurotunnel train in Calais, Rob and I had a five hour debrief and put together some ideas for improvements. For Rob it was to improve his rigs which he has been developing whilst sailing the UPROAR over the last two years in order to fit to his new UP, which she didn’t finish in time for this event. For me it was ideas to improve the stability by simple means and possibly to reduce fin drag. There were many new boats which must be good for the class as those that are discarded will benefit those that might like to change their current boats.
Finally, there is just a reminder that we are running GAMES 4 interclub event on Sunday the 10th and I hope that you will give this your support. A Notice of Race will go out shortly.
Cheers, Roger