The Sailing Bug

Whats the definition of a happy happy happy hour? Well I guess it could be turning up to the yaght club for a quick beer and getting 4 free beers! How did we manage to acomplish this I hear you asking. Well simply volunteer for moving a bunch of wine bottles from the bar to the furthest part of Castle Cornet possibile - thats how! after 20 minutes of labour shifting about 50 crates of wine. A slightly opportunistic bit of barrtering and a bit of manual labour we had a very cheap evening thanks to the GYC and also thanks to Dave for donating his beers to us! If my spelling or grammer seems a bit off then please read the above

Today was the last of the GYC frostbite series and the penultimate race of the year. It certainly lived up to it’s name with temperatures hovering at near freezing this morning on the drive down. Despite an earlier start than usual at the boat with the intention of trying out some start line tactics that Phrixus had be busy researching, we made it as far as the end of the pontoon before we heard the radio announcement cancelling the race! Unfortunately there was almost no wind at all so we could not go out for a practice before the Iceberg race on the 27th December. All being well we should be able to get a good result next week before looking at taking the boat out the water in the New Year for some long overdue maintenance in time for the start of the next season.

A highly accurate (amusing) look at what’s what in the nautical world. It seems like a very apt entry for this website. It was cut from one of ‘those’ emails that goes around! If you are the author and I think it should not be here, I can only apologise and will of course take it off immediately… however at the same time, I would like to say that you must be a sailor to understand these things… good job!

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Today was the first of the Autumn series races and with the sun shining nicely it was looking to be a good day. We where a bit short of due to other commitments so it was just Dave, Aidy and myself out for the race. The winds where light causing a course shortening for our class but it did help us as we had a relative shortage of foredeck experience onboard. We managed to finish fourth of seven - a good allround result given the situation. Hopefully the weather will hold out for the duration of the series and wecan improve on that result.

It was that time of year again last Saturday for the annual Carey Olsen pursuit race to Alderney from Guernsey. We where placed 22 out of 51 with a start time of just after 1PM. On the day we had a good south west wind behind us which made for a pretty quick time of 2 hours and 27 minutes with the spinnaker up all the way. We managed to hit a peak speed of 12.7 knots according to our GPS when surfing down waves and for most of the race where seeing speeds in excess of 9 knots. We managed to overtake quite a few other boats and only get overtaken by one - a Melges who pipped us as we neared the line after they had been hitting 20 knots on the way up, so it was a solid result for us all round topped off with a few beers in the Alderney Sailing Club afterwards courtesy of Carey Olsen’s beer vouchers!

The journey back home the next day was fairly relaxed with a good breeze and calm seas once we got past the south of Alderney with a game of I spy for entertainment before a fry up at the Blue Moon Cafe which I must add was much better than the Boathouse as previously discussed!

It has been a bit quiet on the sailing front recently due to work commitments and crew shortages etc. Next Saturday should see a return to the water with the Carey Olsen Pursuit race from Guernsey to Alderney. Hopefully the weather conditions will be more favourable than last year where it started off with no wind for the begining of the race and then plenty of wind after arriving in Alderney.

Tonight the crew of Mystere will be hading off to compete in the Blenheim Triangle race 2005. This will involve us leaving Guernsey tonight at 9pm and racing overnight to Perros-Guriac in Northern France. After a lay day in port on Saturday we will be heading to Treguier on Sunday and back to Guernsey on the Monday. I will post a full write up once I get back.

We have also completed the window refit and Mystere is now sporting very shiny new window frames and windows that you can actually see through!! Again I will post some photos and some notes on the procedure when I get time.

If you are after pictures of the Little Britain Regatta 2005 held in Guernsey then have a look at www.encaptured.com. I have just been browsing through and there are more than a few half decent shots there.

Last night we had a GYC Boatworks+ spring series race. Despite being down by one crew member and the weather conditions being less than ideal with rain and pretty bad fog, we managed to finish in third place despite our nightmare time handicap we have been assigined. If it had not been for a very strong patch of tide right by the finishing line we may have finished in an even better position. We also had a bit of problem with the engine where it dropped off its latch and required some rather odd techniques to fix it and we got some VERY dodgy looks whilst we where fixing it as well but the less said about that the better!! Everyone did pretty well last night and if we can keep things going like this then it should be a good season.

I thought it was about time I put an update on here that was in some way related to sailing after the spate of recent IT posts so here goes:

The racing season has really started to get into full swing now with Thursday and weekend races. (more…)