scott.projectsomewhere

Australia Day and 18′ skiff racing have never been a brialliant combination, and this year was no different.

Despite the cloudy weather keeping some of the hoardes at bay, the Harbour was still clogged with spectators making our racing pretty tricky.

We were racing well though, having an epic battle with SX and the spooners, swapping the lead every few hundred metres and rounding the marks within a couple of boatlengths over the first two laps.

But on the second downwind our trap strop let go, launching us all off the wing. John retied it around the spreader and after righting the boat we set the kite to try and stay in the race. But 250kg on the wire supported by a spreader is no good. The collar let go and we all ended up in the water again, now with no top spreader.

So as far as results go, it wasn’t really worth rushing back from Geelong for, but then again I still prefer it to spending 12 hours in a car.

The Daily Telegraph has a good story on the day’s racing, and the paper version is running with a big photo of us on our side. The camera boat was blasting along beside us as it happened, so whenever sailcam.tv gets around to editing the footage together, it should be good to watch.

SX has now taken the lead in the series, but will be fighting it out with 7 for the trophy next Sunday. We’re now a bunch of points down in 3rd place.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 9:39 am and is filed under 18' Skiff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.