Easter weekend: the remains

With our Gloucester plans for Calstar blow away with the forecast storms, the remainder of the Easter Holiday required a little rethink but was by no means wasted.

Saturday night was always planned to be a break in the sailing for a gig anyway, so required the least adaptation. It was fun, a good night but quieter than usual. I think a combination of bad weather and a four day weekend meant most folks either stayed in or had gone away elsewhere for Easter. We enjoyed ourselves through. And a lull in the weather meant the drive home afterwards back up the motorway wasn't too bad at all.

Sunday, and the weather was still squally ahead of the big stuff expected for Monday. With conditions too rough to take Calstar out, Ben and I headed over to the lake at Frampton to race "Buffy", our Enterprise dinghy. The wind was laying predominantly in the south west, sometimes lulled, other times blowing hard, with white horses dancing in serried ranks across the lake.

We threw the first race; I didn't check, so didn't realise our handicap had changed with the new season, so started the pursuit race 30 seconds too early. We sailed the race anyway, but would have placed poorly regardless. About halfway into the hour a vicious squall blew through the fleet, knocking us and most of the others flat. The other boats, single-handers all, come up dry. An Enterprise comes up from a capsize swamped and spends the next lap or so labouring through the water like a pregnant cow whilst the autobailers struggle to work their magic.

We were treated to a gorgeous rainbow as we came ashore from the race for lunch.

The second race of the day was a set of three class races running alongside each other. The holiday weather had culled our numbers, so each race had only a couple of boats competing; three races, six boats in total. In the handicap "fleet" against us was Phil in his RS Aero. It's a much faster, more modern and lighter single-hander, so the race was reduced to a time trial; we beat Phil (and everybody else) to the windward mark, but after that he powered away from us and we were left racing the clock. The weather remained squally, unpredictably foul tempered and intermittently violent.

photo: leslie pedrick

The thing about racing one on one is that there is no second place, not really. You either win, or you lose. About half way through, Phil had a three minute lead on us, and was still pulling away. As a squall tipped us in again off a bad gybe, it looked very much like we were going to lose. Except the same squall pitch-poled Phil's Aero, and although the much lighter, self-draining hull is much easier to recover from a capsize than our old, wooden Ent, you've got to catch it first. The toppled Aero was bowled away with the wind and Phil couldn't swim fast enough. Accepting assistance from the safety boat, he had to retire. We righted our own capsize without much drama, and spent the next couple of laps cumbersomely draining the water from our flooded hull. But as the last man standing, winning the race after that was but a simple matter of hanging in until the end.

Bank Holiday Monday was a lazy day. Walked the dogs. Listened to the wind howling about the house, sprawled out on the sofa with the dogs chain-watching episodes of Spooks on Netflix. Quite out of character for me.

It was quite lovely.

The Weekend Cometh

Decision point. Double tide out on the estuary on Sunday; high water around 7am and 7pm respectively. Which means we could explore down channel from Lydney and still get back before dark.

Downside is that we've not been that way before so, whilst exploring unknown waters elsewhere isn't really a worry, dealing with the huge tides of the Severn Estuary on a 19' open sailing boat is not a challenge to be taken on lightly or in ignorance.

High water Sunday evening for the return is an 11.58m rise to deal with. And, of course, the thing with springs is that the high tides are HIGH and the low tides LOW, do there will be shoals and sandbanks galore to navigate.

In our favour is the weather forecast. It's going to blow like buggery tonight and tomorrow, and tomorrow brings the rain. But by Sunday it's supposed to drop off to a relatively moderate F3 southwesterly, a warmish day with sunny intervals. Perfect, in many ways, for a down-channel adventure.

We've discussed it, Dad and I, and have decided the decision will swing on whether or not we can convince any other boats out of Lydney to come down with us.

It's not looking promising so far.

However, the alternative plan is for H and I to race Penny in the Frampton Paddle, which is part of the club's Dave Evans Championship series. I don't normally sail enough of them to qualify, but this year looks like it may prove the exception.

We're currently ranked 5th out of 52 entries so far, but that's going to change as the series progresses and more boats qualify. If we can finish with a top 10 result by the end of the year then I'll be very happy as that will be a very satisfactory conclusion against what it usually a very strong  field.

But I digress. Bottom line is that I don't know what I'm doing on Sunday but whatever it is, it's going to be fun anyway.

On Home Ground

With last Sunday bringing light, shifty, drifty conditions, a small fleet of eight boats and all very practised, accomplished racing crews, our second ever Enterprise Open with 'Penny' was always going to be a challenge. After the brutalities of the previous Bristol Corinthian event, where, truth be told, we only managed to salvage our way back from last place through bloody-mindedness and attrition by simply refusing to give up and go in when saner souls had long since retired, I was feeling somewhat doubtful of our ability to even keep up.

To our theoretical advantage, this event was on our home water, but that just plied on the pressure. To fail to turn in a respectable performance here was going to say something definite about both 'Penny' and us, her crew.

The order of the day was seet as two back-to-back races, followed by lunch, followed by another couple of back-to-backs. We made a point of getting to the line in good time, got a feel for the conditions and worked out the layline for a conservative committee end start on starboard, getting a good feel for the timing on this line. Which was my first cardinal mistake, and should have cost us the race.

Twenty seconds before the starting gun went, I tacked onto starboard just inside the layline I'd worked out, set on making a timed run at the line. And the half-a-dozen other boats that had opted to instead queue on it waiting for the gun put up a big wall that sucked the already light air out of everything downwind of them, killing our sails and leaving us becalmed. The gun went off, the rest of the fleet launched itself over the line, heading or the windward mark, and I was left struggling to put way back on, spitting and cursing at my stupidity for getting into such a daft position in the first place.


Enterprise 19632 'Penny'

In the end, it would be generous to say we were only a minute late crossing the line. We tacked immediately onto port to try and make what good we could out of our now clean air, but it looked like the damage was done, we pushed on, bleakly hoping for the chance to catch the back of the fleet. Moral of the story; in light airs never let yourself get more than a couple of boat lengths behind the line, clean air is everything. What really sucks is that I'd already known this, I'd been here before years back in the Moth, and so should've known better.

I don't remember the windward mark rounding. We might, by then, have caught up with one of the stragglers, but I'm not entirely sure. If not, we caught him not very many moments later. But then, at the top of the second beat, it all miraculously came good. The entire fleet ahead of us sailed into a hole at the green mark (on days like this I like to think of it as the Frampton oubliette). There was much shouting of "Windward!" and "Starboard!" and sundry cursing and grunting as boats becalmed, backed up, hung up on the mark and each other and then the melee drifted a boat length or two away from the mark as they struggled to sort themselves out, leaving us just enough room to round it inside them and sneak ahead behind the one other solitary boat that was able to sail clear.

From almost last to almost first in the space of the first lap. It's little moments of redemption like this that I utterly love and adore in sailing. As one of the other helms that day observed, nobody's safe until they've crossed the finish line.

Lessons learnt from the first race, our start in the race following was almost text-book, setting us up as the second boat around the windward mark. Our fortunes reversed in the third race, when we were badly headed on a close fetch just before we reached the mark, and subsequently becalmed in the shadow of the nearby windward bank, suffered the indignity of most of the rest of the fleet sailing over us.

Against such a strong field we were never going to hold the advantage, but we held our own against most, and matched Geoff and Sue, beating them twice for their two wins against us. In doing so, we exceeded our ambition for the day; I'd set it at simply not coming last, but H over-ruled me, scolding my lack of ambition, and said that we'd instead aim to keep up with Geoff. In the end, we matched them for overall points, but lost out by a single point after discard, the decisive moment only coming in the last leg of the very last race when they overhauled us and the boat ahead on the reach down to the final mark, having been otherwise left behind for the rest of the course. It was a fine comeback for them and a fair win over us, the resulting second place giving them the edge they needed to finally beat us overall.

It was, in summary, possibly the most enjoyable day's racing I've had in quite a while. Splendidly close, tactical and competitive, we made a few mistakes, leant a few lessons and consolidated on lessons and experiences already previously learnt and turned them into places. And, in keeping up with and in contention with the rest of the fleet throughout, redeemed both ourselves and 'Penny' following the brutality and attrition of the previous Enterprise Open in Bristol.

The next Enterprise event is Thornbury Regatta in early June, out on the Estuary. That's going to be different again and will bring with it all sorts of new and different challenges.

I can't wait.