Deben Open Meeting
Today was the Deben Laser Open. I had been following the weather forecast all week and it was expected to be nice and windy. The wind was around 15knots with gusts hitting 25 or even maybe more. Last year we had gone with Steve and Liam but we didn’t know that the sailing area was half an hour’s sailing downstream from the clubhouse and that the format was 3 races back-to-back. This year we knew, though.
I decided to make the trip with Liam. Steve couldn’t make it, so we borrowed his trailer (thanks Steve). we loaded the boats on the trailer the yesterday, so this morning we were ready to go. We arrived there in time, unloaded the boats, went for the briefing, changed and rigged. We launched and we made it to the starting area. Liam had a small mishap during as he was launching, but everything was OK eventually.
On the first race I wasn’t going to have a good start because I found myself in a bad spot. Luckily enough many people were over the line, so it was a general recall. We started under black flag and this time I had a better start. Deben is a tidal river, but since I am not very experienced when it comes to tides, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was doing OK upwind, but I was loosing ground downwind. Still though I didn’t do as well as I would have liked.
On the second race, I messed up the start. While I thought it was about 20 seconds to the start, I checked my watch and it was saying 42 seconds. Because I was too far forward I tacked around and made a turn. I checked my watch again and it was saying 42 seconds, again! Then I realised that it had stopped. That moment I started gearing the others’ watches beeping. I was too far from the line, so I had a quite bad start. I managed to gain a few places and I was just behind of the middle of the fleet and was sailing towards the finish line. Then 200 hundred before the finish line, I capsized. The wind shifted and the boat came on top of me. I recovered as fast as I could, but I had lost 4 -5 places. I was quite pissed off with that, but there was nothing I could do.
On the last race I was a bit too tired and I settled for the second row at the start. Other than that I did quite OK. Down wind I was losing all I was gaining upwind. It seems, I seriously need to sort that out. On the last downwind leg, a couple of boats that were just ahead of me, gained much more on me and I didn’t manage to catch them before the finish line. Overall, I am quite happy with my performance, apart from that capsize.
I finished 17th, 14th and 12th and that gave ma an overall 15th position out of 18. If I didn’t have that capsize at the end of the second race, I would be 12th overall. That’s to show that something like that can be quite costly. Anyway, I am quite happy with my overall performance today. As for the capsize, I’ll have to live with it and the fact that I recovered quite quickly doesn’t make me feel that bad after all.
This coming Wednesday is the last of the series, so I expect quite a few Lasers out.