Oz Day Festivities
I would guess Australia Day for the average punter means a day in the sun, on or around the harbour watching all boats and flags. Lots of national pride and beer and stuff…. with a few million fellow Aussies…
For the 18’s, it means another dreaded race on the harbour with obscene amounts of traffic, the consolation being that if you come off the water without breaking the boat, you’ve had a good day.
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On that note, Noakes and F&P didn’t have a good day. In a port-stbd t-bone, Noakes came off 2nd best, with a hole through their port topside, through the internal frames and out the deck with F&P blowing up their pole and wires. Nice work….
And Rollo doesn’t get back for a few weeks yet…
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We raced a windward-leeward course between Garden Island and Shark Island, given that racing the usual easterly course into Kirribilli would’ve been impossible. To aid the whole visually spectacular aura of the 18’s, the startline was set 200m to leeward of a warship conveniently anchored at 90 degrees to the wind. To cross it’s bow you needed to start at the boat end and pinch, otherwise you needed to tack within the first 100m before the wind shadow. Great work.
We started well, but couldn’t lay and were the last to tack to take 7’s stern, they were the only boat to cross without a tack, and got into the outgoing tide first to take the lead.
We bounced around off the shifts, ferries, tallships and spectators to go down the fleet, then up, then down over the next couple of laps. On the last work, we hooked into the struggling nor-easter, and gained minutes on the front-runners as we reached into the mark at full stick.
Unfortunately, on the run down to the warship finish, we took the well worn route around the front of it, along with the rest of the fleet from 3rd to 15th, all in a nice little bunch. Unfortunately we didn’t come off well, finishing pretty much at the back of that pack.
At one point we were on starboard gybe heading past the stern of the ship to go around to leeward and we tossed up continuing on… but decided to gybe and run the normal route… if only… Smeg went around behind us, and charged through 3-stringing to the finish to claim 4th. Nice work.
Anyway, after that we’d handed our series 2nd place to Fiat, with the rest close behind.
Sunday looked more promising, with a nice building seabreeze.
We started well, a bit too well apparently, with fellow Ullman’s Asko and Smeg being recalled. After our restart, we sailed fast and played catchup to claim 7th, 1 second behind Active Air. In the OCS race we won over Asko and Smeg, so that’s ok.
With a 10 and 7 score, we’re down to 4th or so for the regatta. The spooners on 7 have romped away from the fleet with some great sailing, taking the series (like the States before Christmas) with a race to spare. Not even a collison and capsize with a historical 18 on the last gybe could stop them claiming 5th place and the National trophy. Another very solid performance and something to think about for everyone else with only a few weeks to go before the JJ…
