South Bank Sailing Club Blog

– Race Officers & SB1: Stephen Barnes and Miguel Ferreira – Safety Boat2: Matthew Richardson and Rita Ferreira Another downriver race, which was fun again for me as I haven’ t done safety boat duty for a while so good to be back at the helm arf arf. After all the lovely weather we’ve been having, the day had to be grey, flat and dull, but at least it wasn’ t raining. In typical Southbank fashion the tide timings were wrong and so we had to hang around for an hour otherwise the boats down river would have trouble sailing back up against the tide. And again in Typical Southbank fashion even with the waiting around we were still 15 minutes late for the rescheduled time. The event was broken into down and an upriver races and we made the turning point between Battersea Bridge and Albert Bridge. This was due to the leader of the 1st race being about 15 minutes ahead of the last boat and we were concerned that if the pack had sailed any further, the tide would have turned and ...

– Race Officers : John Parke and Rosie Spink – Safety Boat : Ray Burnet and David Fletcher In spite of a brisk forecast it was a straightforward comfortable wind about force 3 but NE-N so an anti-clockwise course was set to give a fast run back diagonally from the Barnes bank towards the stand. And at the briefing helms were warned that the onshore wind meant that launching would be slower. As a result the first boats were hardly clear of the ramp at the start time and everyone should have been disqualified. Pragmatism prevailed in the office so we postponed for 15 minutes. Ten boats started, all single handers, Allan and Stephanie were upholding SBS’ ‘s reputation at a Corinthian open meeting. No infringements at the first mark and everyone got to marks 2 & 3 without incident. Coming back down towards mark 1, Tara Sally and Elaine drew clear but everyone was on a dead run and not all on the same ” tack” ! The wind had backed N, perfect conditions for t...