Page 28 - Yachter Autumn 2020

28 RACING REPORTS
TWILIGHT DOUBLE-HANDED – RACING IN THE TIME OF COVID-19
The arrival of COVID-19 on our shores led rapidly to the general lock- down and suspension of our entire racing programme. While we were stuck at home looking for excuses to take a break from decorating and gardening, we had time to plan for the day when we could begin the slow and cautious emergence from full lock-down. A new phrase, “social distancing”, entered our vocabulary. What would that mean and just how distant would we need to stay? We monitored government guidance and RYA recommendations based on it, and were determined to stay well within them.
We recognised that anything over ambitious could easily lead to reputational damage
for the club and set back the re-opening of our whole sport. For normal crewed boats it would not be possible to maintain the two metres distance rule and not to touch the same things, either on our competitors’ boats or our committee boats. Anything we organised would therefore, at least initially, be limited to single households on any one boat. Many of our regular racers normally have crew from another household and
several said that they would struggle to build up enthusiasm from within their families. Whatever we did would need to be in a format that would encourage rather than dissuade the less experienced onto the water. Perhaps if they could be persuaded to give
it a go, family members would discover racing together was enjoyable. Our first decision was clear – racing would be for single households only, and we would limit it to two on a boat to keep it fair, since most households could not field more than that.
Our committee boats would also have
to be limited to a single household. We are particularly fortunate to have three couples with the skill and experience to run racing
– Jan and BobTrimble,Angela and Stephen Parry and Jan and Neil Cox – who were
also willing to take on the challenge of running races with only the two of them on board. One of our experienced RIB drivers, Peter Davill, roped in his son Anthony to form a mark laying team, which has proved
invaluable.
With our team lined up all we needed
was to devise a format for racing which was going to be as safe as possible, would keep boats as far apart as possible, and could be run by a team of two. The points of highest risk tend to be the start line and the first rounding mark, where boats are normally closest together and jostling for position. To minimise these risks, we decided to run races in a pursuit format where the slowest boat starts first, and the remaining boats’ starts
are well spread out over typically the next 15 minutes. The finish time is fixed and whoever gets the furthest by the finish is the