Early lead
It’s still early days in the Giltinan, but Club Marine has posted two good results (3rd on Saturday and 1st on Sunday) to be leading the series.
At this early stage, my tips are doing well, with all of the top 3, and 4 of the top 5.
But it’s only early days.
We battled our way through, swapping places with Howie, Asko and 7 around the course. We rounded the first mark in about 6th after Active overlaid the top mark inside us, but thankfully a hand-of-god puff got us down and around Shark Island without a gybe, and put us into the top 3.
We held on, rounding the last top mark in 3rd, before being rolled by Howie as we stuffed the spinnaker set. In the end Howie was lucky not to be decapitated by our leeward wing bar as their trap lines broke and they rounded down only a few boatlengths ahead.
It wouldn’t have been nice for Euan to be known as “the guy who killed Howie”.
Asko came back on the last run from Shark to the finish, we were high after an early gybe at the Island, they got us on starboard gybe, we gybed inside, they rolled through to leeward but we gybed on their transom and rolled them back on port and took 3rd place by only 4 seconds.
Phew.
Sunday was interesting.
The NE seabreeze failed to materialize, with a huge cloud bank sitting just offshore. It was a late rig decision, with the fleet split 60/40 on big vs little. The contenders all went big.
For some unknown reason, we raced a windward-leeward course between Shark and Clarke Islands, 4 times around in the most congested and shifty part of the harbour.
The run-out tide and tiny start line, and puffy-top-end big rig conditions meant we had 2 general recalls before racing finally got underway.
In the final start we broke away clean near the pin. As we approached the better breeze off Bradleys, us, Rag, Asko and Asko Sweden were able to clear out from the pack. At the top mark we held a slim lead over Rag, but with a huge tanker coming through the course we set up for an early gybe and took a big right hand shift inside it towards the bottom marks.
Another hand-of-god.
Rag and the rest of the fleet didn’t gybe and ended up outside the tanker, struggling to lay the leeward gate if they gybed late or getting stuffed too close to leeward of the ship if they gybed too early.
So we had a about a 3 minute lead after 1 lap and about 8 minutes of racing.
The debacle of a race continued, we held on and won by 40 seconds or so. Rag was 2nd over the line but found out they were OCS, so Cocko on Fiat and Dennis on Southern Cross took out 2nd and 3rd.
Even though it took only 35 minutes and was marred by shifty winds and plenty of traffic, we’ll happily bank the 1st.
Here’s the progressive results after 2 races.
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In other news… Rollo was disgusted after having so many opportunities for a collision on the short course and having come away completely unscathed.
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Herman on Appliances was protesting a yacht after getting their pole trapped in the keelboat backstay - then being towed at 6 knots down the harbour towards the Bridge.
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Seve ended up rounding the bottom mark 3 times on the first lap after getting the mainsheet stuck in the tiller extension. Sam and Rob were frantically running from side to side as the boat tacked and gybed in circles around the gate. Not bad to get back into 5th place. Did I say these guys were fast?
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Asko had a bad day after rounding in the top 5. They capsized on the leeward gate after coming in hot on starboard on the 2nd lap. The snap shackle on the bottom of the marker ended up getting caught on their pole wire. Lucky they’ve thrown out the rule about hitting marks… for some reason I don’t think these marks are going to be in good shape by the end of the week.
