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DBYC Results: Race Training Day - 30 October 2005

Preceded by an evening’s Rules & Tactics refresher, a day of ’drag-racing‘ was arranged along similar lines to the Sail Training Weekend in 2003. Drag-racing is a form of live training, where the boats complete a normal start and beat to finish at a windward mark, then the fleet returns to the start to repeat as desired. It’s a fun, but very effective way of improving your crew’s confidence and ability at the start.

The exercise could be split into two main area: Start and Beat. The start line on the first race could not exactly be described as ‘busy’ at the gun, but that changed very quickly as skippers (or tacticians) got a handle on the timing. By the third start, no quarter was being given and all boats were crossing the line within 30 seconds of the gun.

The tactics portion of the preceding R&T briefing had touched on oscillating and persistent wind shifts and that aspect was certainly crucial on the beat. John Karas and Ian Cusack aboard Committee Boat Trakka took a little while to set up the course, given the unexpected N’ly, and the unusual wind direction curling over and through the Lantau hills resulted in an interesting pattern over the race-course.

Small oscillating shifts were apparent and certainly worth taking in short tacks on the bottom half of the course, but the top half concealed a juicy backing persistant shift that meant that boats had to complete the beat from the port lay-line or lose-out big time! As soon as this was realized, the battle for control of the port lay-line became the over-riding consideration.

And many a battle there was, at various levels throughout the fleet - see the comments from our ‘eye-in-the-sky’ reporter, attached as a post-script to the detailed results here.

At the end of the day, much fun was had by all, but everyone went to the bar a little wiser, we hope, and certainly more practiced at the fine art of ‘drag-racing’. The final scores, with congratulations to Wings for a convincing win, were as follows:

Place Boat Race 1 Race 2 Race 3 Race 4 Race 5 Race 6 Total points 1st Wings 1 1 2 2 1 1 7 2nd Wizard 4 3 1 1 3 3 14.5 3rd Authority 3 2 3 4 5 2 19 4th Lorien 2 4 4 5 2 6 23 5th Shockwave 7 7 6 7 4 5 36 6th= Rosemary 8 5 8 3 6 7 37 6th= Sabi Star 5 8 7 6 7 4 37 8th Thea 6 6 5 8 8 DNF 42

If you want to use your freshly-honed starting skills on other DBYC events this month, check out the details of the Tsing Ma Regatta scheduled for 19/20 Nov here.

photos courtesy Sue Fernie

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