Last of the Wednesday evening racing for this season, and what a lovely evening it was. The race was run by John Long, Stella Vesey as ARO with Guy and Gill Partington on the ferry. 10 knots of wind going down for the race with a Spring Low but the X's managed to keep out of trouble. Merlin was an all girl boat in fact an all London hospital nurses boat- we all discovered we were nursing at more or less the same time -give or take. How cool is that! Anyway back to the race - Roger in X50 and Alastair on X186 fought it out between them with Merlin in hot pursuit. Well not quite, we were chatting so much no one was looking.Guy was busy taking photos of Tina on Merlin (I asked him not to take a photo if the spinnaker wasn't full). The sole Swallow sailor followed the line of X50 up the harbour but the echo sounder isn't as efficient as the garden cane- he ran aground so completely that it took some long time to get him off and tow him home by this time in the dark. Lots of drinking in the bar followed by supper - What a great happy evening for the end of the year.
A huge grateful thanks to those who took their turn in helping to run the racing but massive thanks must go to John and Tina who have run the racing on eight evenings and without their help we wouldn't have had any RO'ing due to the lack of offerings from many others.
So THANK YOU JOHN AND TINA. The Swallow fleet willingly took their turns and ran five of the scheduled 23 scheduled races with only two evenings cancelled.
Sun was out again on Saturday with enough wind for the finale of the Griffith Challenge. John and Jeremy in the lead on X80 and Roger by himself on 50 in hot pursuit with the rest of us fighting it out for third place. X160, X152, X73, X184 and X103, who ran aground on the way to Thorney. X160 managed to break through to take third place with X152 in 4th. So thats another cup for X181 who has won the series. Well done Mr and Mrs Spencer.
Sunday was another story, every spinnaker run turned out to be a near fetch and with the spinnaker and pole always on the wrong side and hot competition on your hips made a challenging couple of races.
See you on the water - in Merlin.