The Dragons had a wonderful weekend of sailing and, importantly, time on the balcony! We were blessed with two sunny days of sailing in a decent fresh wind, though the direction meant we needed to be imaginative on the Saturday race, but were able to do WB on Sunday morning.

Saturday all four boats set off on an extended, special town course. Getting down to No 11 buoy off the marina was fine in the slack neap tide and the run back down to No 1 buoy was going well for Andy Moss in Hands Off, finding himself with a good lead. Until, that is, he got to No 3 buoy, which he decided, along with his crew, was where No 1 buoy should be. A quick recovery following an alerting whistle from Mark Wade on Avalanche had all four boats very close together.

After that there was a long, very long, hard slog back up river to No 11 buoy against a foul, very foul, tide. Avalanche and Ian Gray on Still Crazy opted to short tack along the south shore. Hands Off and David Warner on Dublin Bay opted to go onto the north shore and for a long time it looked as if they had made the right choice. But then, dear reader, the effort of getting around the Rice & Cole, RCYC, RBYC and Public jetties took its toll. Avalanche and Still Crazy were battling it out and as they got to the buoy and turned for home Still Crazy inched ahead of Avalanche. Given that we had been racing a good two hours by then, the valiant volunteers in the race box sensibly shortened the course, allowing a very close finish with a win for Still Crazy.

Sunday dawned with a slightly fresher wind and a poorly Avalanche team, so they DNS, leaving the three other Dragons to have a lovely sail. Dublin Bay had imported Jono Brown as helm for this race, with the result that they gave Still Crazy a tight race all round the course, with Hands Off in the mix for the first round, then falling back a couple of boat lengths by the finish.

We experimented with an on-crew video camera on Sunday and hope to post the edited results shortly.

Tim