Csárdás

It’s been a while since I updated this blog.  As you may have noticed I have just migrated the old blog over to Wordpress.  The old blog software was way out of date and always had a few problems.  So this switch over was long overdue.

Csardas came out of the water on 22nd March for a couple of coats of antifouling and went back in early on 5th April.  Phil, Ian and I were keen to get out sailing so we literally drove her out of the slings straight down to the bridge and out into the harbour for a quick sail.   The sun was shining and there was a light breeze, so a very pleasant first sail of the season.

Phil and I participated in the first PYRA (Poole Yacht Racing Association) persuit race on May 4th.  Csardas has an IRC rating handicap which puts us in class 1 with the serious racers and their carbon fiber sails and 8 strong crew.  The two of us have absolutely no chance sailing to our official handicap with a boat set up for cruising with dirty white sails.  But it’s the taking part that counts!   The wind died before any boat had even reached the first mark and yachts ended up pointing in all directions.  The 2 hour time limit was up before the lead boat had reached the second mark.  The finishing boats had a hard job determining any kind of finishing order.  It was probably all a bit random but we finished something like 14th out of 28 boats.

The next event was the PYRA Poole - Lymington - Poole weekend.  Phil and Wayne joined me for that.  This time there was absolutely NO wind.  After hanging about for a bit to see if the wind would pick up the race officer told everyone to motor in convoy towards Lymington and hope for breeze.  It never came.  So we cracked open the beers and turned the music up.  Others found novel ways to entertain.  Eye 2 Eye hoisted their spinnaker and then appeared to motor backwards to fill it!  Mark Taylor from Ear to Absurdity entertained the fleet by wakeboarding behind his yacht, using the Spinnaker Halyard.  His crew motored the boat at full revs.  Yes, it worked.  It was quite a spectacle.

The following morning there was a slight breeze in the Solent and we were able to do a short race.  Neither Wayne nor Phil had set a spinnaker before so I wasn’t expecting us to do very well against the other class one boats.  Not surprisingly we finished last.  However, as there were only three boats in Class 1 we came away with third place :-).   The wind was accentuated by the Solent and once outside it died away to almost nothing again.  There was to be a race from the North Channel marker to Poole.  We hoisted the Spinnaker about 100m back from the start line only to have the wind die on us before we’d even crossed it!  They extended the start time in view of the conditions but still many boats didn’t make it, including us. We again motored all the way back to Poole!  In fact no one finished that race within the allowed time.

Despite the lack of wind we enjoyed blazing sunshine and good company at Lymington.

The next planned trip is a PYRA race weekend to Cherbourg and back on June 6th.  A few jobs to do on the boat before then, and hopefully time for a short bay sail too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Csardas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.