WSS 3 report by Roger Stollery
The journey to Chertsey was mainly sunny, but approaching the town the sun disappeared! You could barely see the other side of the lake and that question was asked again, “Are we mad”! It was good to have 8 competitors and especially David Coode with his 21/2 hour drive from Herefordshire. After setting 5 marks for the south south-east wind including 3 windward marks, I tried my BOTTLE boat in what appeared to be no wind, but it sailed off into the mist and I was able to follow its progress down to the 2 blue gate marks, which you could not see from the control area steps! To test whether we could race properly we started a practice race and satisfied ourselves that it might just be OK.
When Race 1 started on the simple windward leeward course, the wind was not cooperative and you could see from the swirling mist that the wind was blowing from every direction, sometimes from the north and sometimes from the south and then sometimes not at all. If you are lucky you might just about be able to see how your boat was reacting to it, but it was extremely difficult. Having done a penalty early in the race, by the time I got to the gate my place was last with the fleet already starting back up the course on the rhumb line with very little wind. The pace of the race was extremely slow indeed there were comments about “paint drying” being uttered in jest.
With nothing to lose I opted to stay near the far bank where the wind was stronger and used the direction of the swirls of the mist to either sheet in or out. With the basically southerly wind my plan was to use this to go some way towards the south bank before reaching back to the windward mark and approach it ‘at speed ‘ from above the normal lay line, whilst the rest of the fleet were struggling in the doldrums. All would have worked well to round the mark first had I not hit the mark with the projecting jib boom of my swing rig! Even a short penalty in next to no wind was not what was anticipated by taking this strange long route. At this point probably after about half an hour there appeared to be no wind and the short leg back to the finishing line was really frustrating, but Mike Wilkie continued to extend his lead and cross the line 1st ahead of myself and Alan Viney, the eventual winner of the event.
The sun had started to burn the mist away, but the lack of wind did not encourage any more racing and we had a long break for lunch before deciding to race again. I had rigged up my new 36″ XITE design, to test the workings of the vane gear on a new pintle plate, which had broken at Gosport on the previous Saturday. The plan was to chase it in the inflatable dinghy, which in little wind should have been no problem. However just as I launched the sun was fully out and the breeze filled in to give me a really hard time on the oars to keep up!
The fleet got back on the water and raced until 2 PM sailing another 4 races, which apart from Race 3 which was won by David Coode, were all won by Alan, as you can see from the results.
