05/01/2020
RBRYC commenced the 2020 IOM scratch series on Sunday at Montrose Bay. Kyle Stewart provided the following report:
"A wonderful day greeted the 14 sailors who came along for the first scratch round of the year. The hardest decision on the day was choosing the A or B rig, given the wind wanted to mess with both throughout. In the end, we had just two intrepid sailors with enough intestinal fortitude to use the A during the day (both taking out wins when the wind didn’t get too much for them), the rest remained on B. Stu Dawes came along to pro for the day (thanks Stu), however, after a few races, Les Hanson passed his controller on to Stu and Les Pro’d for the rest of the day. Thanks for your help today guys.
The buoys were checked and re-set where needed, giving us multiple start lines now, as well as the ability to start into both the northerlies (such as today) and to cater for the afternoon southerlies, should they turn up – all in aid of less time on course preparation. Still room to improve, but we are getting very close to a real good placement of marks for any condition.
Unfortunately, we had a few breakdowns today, which took a fair number of skippers out, but they will be back for round two, with the reliability issues all sorted. The racing itself was amongst the best I have seem in a very long time. Not only was it quite close in the results – more so than the final tally shows, but you could often have 4-6 yachts finishing within seconds of each other.
It was also fantastic to see the on-course communication improved so much, advising others of what you were doing etc. Also, the amount of penalties taken without any prompting at all has to be mentioned. Great to see someone apologise for an error and quickly doing their penalty turn, and for the ones called for buoy contact, all of them (as far as I saw) were done without question and straight away. Exactly what the club needs to promote – so a great job by everyone today.
We had our two new members on the water today, Paul and Justin Rogers, both sailing Cockatoos. Both had some issues on the water, but given time, will start to finish many more races and become competitive in time. Give it time and patience guys, and the rewards will come.
Today, Ray Joyce blasted out of the blocks, and was hardly headed, a deserved winner of round 1 on 14 points. Rod Jackman had a welcome return to form, maintaining some excellent consistency (and seemingly knowing exactly how many drops he could have) coming in second on 18 points. Mike Hickman was also very consistent, coming in third on 22 points."