Pottle Who?
Today, the second race would be the “Pottle Race”. I have to admit that I don’t know what it is about but I am sure it had to do with fog, because I arrived at the club and there was thick, dense fog. Visibility was bad and on top of that there was no wind to make the fog go away. At 10:00 we couldn’t even see the dam wall. There were some ideas thrown around, like going out and roll tacking to cause some disturbance in order to clear the fog! Eventually we sat there chatting. At around 11:00 we were told that the first race was scraped and that we would only have the second race, the Pottle Race, at midday.
So I went out for the Pottle Race quite early and I had a good warm-up. I got a really good start but soon I started falling behind. Not much happened really, especially with the light winds. I ended up last. I was expecting that I wouldn’t do bad in light winds, but unfortunately my weight didn’t help. After the race, we had a light lunch and we went back out for a bit of training.
We practiced starts, rolling tacks and rolling gybes. We were out for a couple of hours I guess and I have to admit that my rolling tacks and gybes need some more work. As for my starts, it might be that I have been lucky recently. Actually I am happy that at the club they are talking about getting a couple of top Laser coaches. Hopefully, that will help me improve a lot.
Anyway, strange day today, so I hope that the weather won’t be like this again. Next year, before the Pottle race, I suggest, we better find out what it is about because Pottle’s spirit does bad things to sailing weather.