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It has been a tradition for some time at Haven Ports Yacht Club to race for the Pete’s Pot Trophy each year on Boxing Day. This morning Jan, Neil and I arrived at NINJOD ready to do our best.
There was an impressive 13 yachts on the start line this morning. We had a very good start, in fact I’d go as far as to say it was one of my best starts ever. We were the 2nd yacht around the 1st mark, just off the stern of Kiss (an X35) and just ahead of Cheap Thrill (a Cork 1720). We then hoisted our asymmetric spinnaker and sped off towards the 2nd mark.
We sailed a pretty good race and managed to stay at the sharp end of the fleet for most of the race. The day however was not without incident; at one point we lost a working sheet on our asymmetric, it just opened on its own. It took us a some time to sort it out.
Niggles aside we were pleasantly surprised to be told we came 3rd on corrected time, our 1st significant placing on new NINJOD and in our last race of the year. Our manoeuvres were good and it was nice to mix it up and be competitive in a predominantly fully crewed fleet.
Full results can be found here . Well done to Roger Harvey on Dash for his impressive win.
A second Sunfast 3200 now joins NINJOD at Suffolk Yacht Harbour. Not sure of the name currently but I hope they are out for racing on Sunday.
Last weekend saw some sailing action on NINJOD. On Saturday Michael and I hooked up with John Parker and Mike from One Sails for a sail. The original idea was to take at look at each of the sails that had been built by One Sails, our sailmaker. On the day however there was a fresh 17 to 20 knot breeze so we stuck with our new No 3 and a full mainsail.
NINJOD No 3
NINJOD No3
As we headed out of the river we managed to get some pretty good boat speeds, so much so that I thought the log might have been over reporting. I checked this by looking at our SOG (Speed Over the Ground) and was pleasantly surprised to see we were in fact going well, very well.
As we came onto the breeze and wound in our sails in John got his camera out and got busy snapping. We were enjoying ourselves and then thought we’d pop the CZ (Code Zero) up. After a bit of fiddling we unfurled the sail and watched our boat speed increase to over 10 knots.
Haven Ports Frostbite Number 3
On Sunday Jan, Neil, Will and I arrived on board for 0900 ready to prepare NINJOD for our 3rd race in the Haven Ports Yacht Club Frostbite series. We had missed the 2nd race in the series as Jan and I were busy training in the Lake District for next years Lakeland 50.
The race itself was a little frustrating. Our start wasn’t too bad but our (my) sail selection in our No 3 was the wrong choice, we should have used the larger No 2 headsail. Knowing we had made the mistake we rounded our first mark, unfurled our Code Zero and then switched the headsails. Unfortunately the choice of Code Zero was also incorrect; we should have hoisted our Asymmetric spinnaker.
In our beat up the River Stour we made good progress and had managed to take back some of the ground we had lost in the early stages of the race. As we turned and ran downwind in the Stour we flew our symmetric spinnaker. We turned left back into the River Orwell and had planned to put our Code Zero back up however a halyard issue prevented us from doing so and consequently lost some of the ground we had reclaimed earlier.
With my poor sail selection and our halyard niggles during the race I wasn’t really expecting anything exciting in the results. I was however pleasantly pleased to see that after 2 hours and 13 minutes of racing we had achieved 4th position. Furthermore there was only a 1 second difference between our 4th position and 3rd position and, there was only a 39 second difference between us and 2nd place. I found this all very reassuring and all I need to do now is get my head around the right sails to use.
Full results can be found here
