North East Clubs 2006 Late Series Event 1 – Brechin – 28th October 2006

This winter’s North East Clubs Series kicked off at Brechin with a lower than expected 6 skippers taking part.

Due to the small fleet it was agreed to run races without an OOD but using Andrew Haxton as a dedicated race starter and scorer and relying on skippers to take appropriate penalty turns on the course following any incident. Over the day this approach worked well and competitors had a good days racing in line with the spirit of the winter series.

At the start of the day things did not look too promising with heavy rain and very little wind. So much so that the first race had to be shortened to one round in order to finish inside the time limit. Luckily the rain cleared and the wind increased progressively allowing longer racing under sunny skies in the afternoon. The westerly wind direction and the topography of the lake made the beats and runs tricky with the tree banks and the island causing wind shadows and eddies that were difficult to predict.

Ali Law with 3 race wins was sailing his wooden Nip and Tuck design which showed some good performance at times and clearly has a lot of potential. Colin McGinnis had just rigged new Stealth sails on his Gadget and his results noticeably improved over the day as he got to grips with tuning his rig. He was awarded a prize for most improved skipper.

The racing at the front was between the well sorted Isis of Ralph Knowles (6 wins) and the Stealth of Ian Dundas (9 wins) with Ian’s consistency coming through over the afternoon session.

A total of 18 races were sailed.

Final positions were:

Full results (pdf file)