You may not have been aware of it, but we have been enjoying the dog days of summer, so called because the dog star, Sirius, (named after Orion’s hunting dog) is in its ascendancy. Similarly, did you know that this month of the year saw the first outing of the song, ‘Rule Brittania’, in 1745? If you’re kind enough to read on, you’ll discover who else ruled the waves in this noble month of August!
The biggest event of the month has to be Poole Week. For this reason, top billing goes to Richard W & Jack for winning this competition, finishing first in 71% of the races. That percentage might have been higher if it had not been for one navigational error, and an overly eager start in race 6. This was kind of Richard, since it has allowed the teams sailing fifteen boats to say they’d beaten 4114 on the water: an occurrence rarer than the sighting of rocking horse poo! Geof and Dave, along with Martin and Andrew were the beneficiaries of Richard’s generosity since they won the remaining two races.
It was a close fought event. Team Linder pushed the eventual winners all the way. Had it not been for the dreaded race four, where the race team showed their prowess by catching 7 boats OCS (including 4115), the final outcome might have been in more doubt. This wasn’t the only event of note. If you look at the results, you will see next to Mervyn and Ron’s name the initials NSC. Sadly, because of a mishap which will be explored later, 4111 arrived in the finish area quite a long time after the last fifteen had finished, and, with perhaps a modicum of justification, they crossed the start line as they would normally do when finishing a club race, failing to notice that a separate finish line had been laid. Talk about adding insult to injury! So, what of the incident to which I alluded? It’s a bit early in this report to list Rasputin Cup winners, but Mervyn and Chris Gorringe have managed to win this prestigious award. A legal technicality means they can’t be accused of leaving the boat without permission. In fact, in Chris’ case he preferred to stay aboard and offered Nadia the opportunity of jumping out into the mud and pushing the boat off. You won’t be surprised to learn that Nadia declined his offer! So, their offence is ‘mistreating the keel by going aground’. The fact that Mervyn went aground in exactly the same spot as Chris just shortly afterwards is disputed, but it makes a better story! To give you a flavour of the quality of the racing, we had 23 entries, 22 of which had at least one top ten result! To finish this section, I’m going to give another shout out to Chris and Nadia who had the smallest discard of the fleet (15^th). Full results are on the club web-site under Major Events, where you will see that the remaining podium place was taken by Phil and Martin.
Well, that’s our equivalent of the Champions League dealt with, what about the Premiership? Club, series racing in August has been just as much of a headache for the teams on the box as it has been for us, the competitors! We’ve had five races, 3 on Saturdays and 2 on Wednesdays. 21 boats sailed at least once on the former and 22 on the later. Three boats, 4027, 3966 and 3901 sailed in all five races, chapeaux to them! The first race of the month (01/08) saw us visiting Wych mark, little did we know that this was to become a fairly regular occurrence. The most remarkable thing about the race was that it led to a report from one of the Scroggies, this time Ben: such reports are as rare as hen’s teeth! He describes a leg from Wych to Hutchings where the fleet were undecided whether to raise their spinnaker. It won’t surprise any of you to learn that the first boat to do so was Chris and Nadia’s. How often have we seen that! The second Saturday race (08/08) saw yet another report from Ian Zimmerman, in which he was practically begging someone else to come third in a race! In fact, he took matters into his own hands later on in the month by absenting himself from a race – drastic measures don’t you think? The last Saturday race gave Richard & Jack their second victory, sandwiching one in the second race by Team Linder, (Sam has been adopted apparently!)
The annual activities of the Parkstone Youth meant that we only sailed on two Wednesdays in August. The first of these (12/08) was won by Pete & Jo and is fully described in Geof’s report, despite the latter’s many attempts to avoid third place by employing navigational errors, penalty turns, and deliberately taking risky options: all to no avail! The final club race of August saw the race officer having to use the change of course procedure in mid-race. Luckily for all of us, this caused much less confusion that those enforced changes just before the warning signal.
You might like to know, just for interest’s sake, that if we had monthly series results (no discards allowed), Saturdays would have been won by Team Linder (4115), chased by Chris/Nadia and Richard/Alan. Wednesdays’ winners would have been Pete and Jo, closely followed by Phil/Martin 4058) and the FFFS (3922). However, we do have a monthly competition; one that is run on slightly different lines, i.e. the number of boats beaten, with the caveat that you can only win the award once on Wednesdays and once on Saturdays, which gives more of us the chance to taste the ‘chocolates’, in this case, beer!
Having explained all this I can announce that the ‘sailors of the month’ for Saturdays are Richard and Jack who beat 39 boats in total, giving an average of 13. The ‘sailors of the month’ for Wednesdays are Pete and Jo with a total of 32 boats beaten with an average of 16. Pete and Jo have now disqualified themselves from further free beer drinking, but they weren’t the first team to do it. That accolade goes to Crispin and Steve who achieved the same feat last month. The year Ann and I won our prize, I think was in December, but it doesn’t say that on the label!
I have already mentioned that the Rasputin Cup has been awarded, but the recipients have yet to receive their official photographic acknowledgement of their achievement. Don’t worry, the Rasputin committee have long memories – Mervyn and Chris, we will get you!
The only award left to reveal is the ‘Reporter of the Month’. Amusing though the intervention of AI was, we’ve decided to give the award to a report written by a human alone! Ian Zimmerman valiantly wrote two of these, but he won the award last month, and we don’t want to encourage him to keep coming third. So, despite this other author’s attempts to avoid coming third, which added to the enjoyment of reading his report, the award goes to Geof Gibbons.
Well, that’s it for August. One thing I’ve learnt this month is that my wife has a past I wasn’t aware of! Something to look forward to is a trophy race scheduled for racing in September: The Bob Hoare Trophy (26/09). We will also try for our second mini-series. Keep an eye on the announcements page of the Whats app group.
JK