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DF65 & DF95 Social Racing 2025 – 7/5/25

DF95

Skippers arriving at Gautby road today could be forgiven for thinking not just that they were in the wrong location, but possibly the wrong country. Blue sky, blue water, and a reasonable breeze blowing straight down the lake – it doesn’t get any better than that.

The usual course was used with the full length of the lake available. There was a bit of bias on the line but not enough to spoil the starts, but more importantly the leeward gate was definitely biased making for some very busy roundings and in Mdsp’s case a boat well and truly caught on the mark rope after cutting it too fine. After the first couple of races, Dave moved the finish up to the top of the course to give a second full beat which worked very well.

Clive aced the day with seven wins out of ten races, finishing comfortable ahead of Ian Davies who sailed consistently quickly, won two races and was unlucky not to win another when he was overtaken on the final beat. Martin also sailed very consistently to finish third ahead of Mikedsp who gradually got up to speed during the morning but also managed to hit most of the marks at one stage or another.

Richard was fifth, one point ahead of Dave and John who were tied on points with John finishing ahead on countback despite having to leave his boat caught on the windward mark in the last race.

A lovely day to race model yachts – full results as below.

  1. Clive Warren                                    9 pts           7 wins
  2. Ian Davies                                        21 pts           2 wins
  3. Martin Whittingham-Jones    28 pts
  4. Mike de St Paer                             29 pts           1 win
  5. Richard Walker                             36 pts
  6. John Beech                                      37 Pts           1x 2nd
  7. Dave Williams                               37 pts
  8. Malcolm Harvey                           59 pts

DF65

A disappointing turnout of only 4 skippers took to the water for some “extreme social sailing”  despite the blue sky and reasonable breeze. A+ rigs  were the order of the day.  We didn’t bother with a starter box, we didn’t even have a finishing post, just an imaginary line at 90 degrees to the finishing buoy.  The course was set, which was the same as the morning but with the finish halfway up the lake. Clive (our countdown clock for the afternoon) got the sailing underway with a countdown from 20secs.
After sailing 2 races we decided to swap boats and transmitters, the only exception being Charles who has his transmitter set up ‘left handed’ so it was decided this would be too much of a change for both Charles and the ‘swapee’. This proved to be an interesting exercise to see how different the boats were set up by different skippers. Two races were sailed in this format so the rotation went full circle.  A further 3 races with our own boats were sailed before we decided to call it a day.
Results
An Honourable draw all round, well what did you expect with extreme social sailing,
Thanks to David White, Andrew Potter, Charles Legg and Clive Warren for an enjoyable afternoon