Tim Dobson's Blog

Turning down an invitation to go to 5 Daze in May with some friends, I figured that the wind was a force 4-5 and it would be exciting sailing at GSC.

After Wednesday, where I was vastly overpowered in an RS Feva, on my own with all three sails up at once, I made the wise choice of choosing a little less sail power this evening.
A Topper dinghy.

After getting, by my standards, an excellent start, I was ahead of my immediate competitor as I beat upwind to the first mark. As a rounded it, relatively widely, a Laser from behind came up on the inside, and, waiting a minute to long, managed to hook my mainsheet under it's bow, resulting in the sailing equivalent of being rammed. whist untangling probably only took 30 seconds or so, it was clear that I had lost my lead as the boat I was racing myself against had overtaken.

For the rest of the lap, I was relatively happy that the gap between me and this boat did not grow any larger, and on the upwind, I thought I might have cornered it by doing longer tacks making more use of the available wind.

However, whilst tacking I noticed my rudder come up, Mildly surprised I looked to put it back down and noticed that one of the four points holding the transom plate, the bit the rudder is attached to, to the boat had come unattached. realising that the rudder could easily pull the plate off if I continuued to sail it, especially in the prevailing wind conditions, I limped back in, a bit gutted that my rather enjoyable time had been spoilt, twice.

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Photos of Torside Reservoir © Tim Dobson 2008
Copyleft : This work is free, you can copy, spread, and modify it under the terms of the Free Art License - http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/