Matt Smith has won the first day of our virtual Spring Series.
On Saturday evening we had the first set of races in our new Virtual Spring Series. The way this works is that we have three races back-to-back, which are scored with one discard. Each set of three races counts as one race in the series overall.
We have two series in Spring: Saturday and Wednesday. For the Saturday Series we are using the Star class, which makes for close racing (as there is no Spinnaker). In the first race we had eight participants, with a close finish.
In first place we had Matt, followed by Adam and Oliver, who managed to recover from a bad start. Matt lead from start to finish.
In the second race we had two additional sailors who joined in, and some exciting ‘incidents’ at the windward mark. Nathan managed to get a good start, as did Will, but Matt persevered in the end, after a close finish, beating Oliver by 6 metres.
In the final race, Matt relaxed (as nobody could catch up with his two bullets), and Oliver read the biased start line well and managed to stay ahead of the field, winning comfortably. Adam came second, followed by Nathan. Matt ended as fifth, just behind Phil.
The Star class is very tactical, and quite forgiving; a ten-second penalty doesn’t take you back too far, unlike the faster boats. There was some close racing, and no doubt it will get even closer once our sailors will get better at reading the wind shifts and noticing the areas of pressure on the course.
Of course it is not the real thing, but given the present situation, it’s a good approximation, and with the post-race Zoom call we get some approximation of the usual Saturday activities.
The next race will be on Wednesday, where we will be racing in the J/70 class — with a spinnaker this time!