Report by Roger Stollery
Guildford Model Yacht Club club sailed its first event at Abbey Meads for 4 months and we had some really good sailing in the bitterly cold north-westerly winds. There was lots of close racing with half a dozen entries with equal numbers of DF 95s and BOTTLE boats.
The event was not without its problems. Having removed the difficulty of the wooden launching platforms being vandalised by replacing them with our removable lightweight aluminium body platform into our metal container, we thought we were clear of the vandals’ influence. How wrong we were, because we were shocked to find that the vandals had filled the keyway to the main padlock securing the container with two-part epoxy resin!
After an hour so of trying to find a solution to ‘breaking in’, we gave up and got on with the sailing which, as this was in school holidays, had attracted Roger’s son and grandsons to add to Martin, Charles and Les Thorn’s DF95s.
Charles had to leave early and later the children got cold and amused themselves out of the wind in the car, which left 4 of us enjoying some really good racing with exciting speeds in the strong gusts off wind as well as tactical beating to keep on the right side of the shifts and to avoid the calmer patches.
Although we didn’t keep any scores it was clear that Les was the winner of the most races whilst all of us won at least one race. Les was especially delighted to be able to say that he had beaten Peter Stollery!
This showed that the performance of the DF 95 and the BOTTLE boat are equivalent in these conditions, although going downwind at the same speed they look so different with the slim bowed 95s cutting through the water cleanly, whilst there is spray everywhere from the crude shape of plastic cup & bottle bow.
Hopefully these Wednesday morning events will attract more visitors to enjoy the fantastic sailing at Abbey Meads Lake and help to build up Guildford’s fleet of DF 95s.
