Day 1
A Wonderful Way To Start The Week
It would have been hard to ask for better sailing conditions than those that greeted the competitors in Poole Week as they headed out into the harbour for the first day of racing. They were met with a sun that just didn’t blink, and a south-easterly wind of 12-16 knots that, on the Parkstone platform, hardly moved from 130° all day.
It was rather more shifty for the fleets that started from Parkstone Yacht Club’s committee boat in the Top Triangle. The windward marks of the trapezoid and windward/leeward courses were in the lee of Brownsea Island, where there were plenty of holes and some quite lively gusts. It was by no means uncommon to see RS200s, RS400s and Merlin Rockets reaching into the second mark of a trapezoid course with their spinnakers ragging, hoping to lay the mark for the bear-away without having to drop before they got there. ’Shifty, gusty, tricky’, was how one Merlin Rocket sailor succinctly put it. He was one of eight Merlins in a highly competitive fleet that includes Mike and Jane Calvert, who regularly feature at the top of the results on the national circuit.
Joining the Merlins in the Top Triangle were the XODs, Wayfarers, RS200s and 400s and the fast handicap, all completing two races. The biggest fleet by far was the XODs, among whose number were seven visiting boats from Itchenor and Lymington. Convincing winners of the past couple of Poole Weeks, John Tremlett and his crew from Itchenor ended the day at the top of the leader board with a 1,2. All the other visiting boats also finished in the top 10, leaving space for only three locals.
The fast handicap fleet comprises a Contender, RS600, RS800, Lark, MRX and the new kid on the block, a Melges 15, which ended the day on 3 points, as did David Evans in his Contender.
Further east in the harbour, most of the Parkstone Platform fleets had a single race, just the Dart 18s sailing two. Despite his misgivings before the start (‘I prefer it lighter and more tactical, but it’s breezy today and there are bigger and stronger people in the fleet than me’), Peter Stacey found his way to the front of the fleet in both races, with Suzie Clayton on the trapeze.
In the ILCA 6s (still known to many of us as Laser Radials) it was two of the junior Hakes, Will and Tom, who filled the top two places. Hakes Senior, Roger, came fourth in the ILCA 7s (Laser full-rig) behind Parkstone regular front-runners Alan Davies, Chris Whalley and Andrew Hartley.
For the Flying Fifteens – all 23 of them – finding the right windward mark was part of the day’s fun, with a divergence of opinion across the fleet producing what might be seen as an atypical set of results.
A rather smaller fleet is the Bembridge Redwings, their towering rigs and red sails making them easy to spot as they add a splash of colour to the proceedings along with the (mostly) tan-sailed Cornish Shrimpers.
Monday brings changes in who sails where, with Sunday’s Top Triangle fleets heading east to join the Darts, Shrimpers and slow handicap sailing from the Parkstone Platform, while the rest of Sunday’s platform fleets go the other way for their committee boat starts. It looks like another day of sunshine and south-easterlies to look forward to.
