Page 32 - Yachter Spring/Summer 2021

32 RACING REPORTS
Unsurprisingly, once racing got going there was huge pressure for all the clubs
to fill the diary to try and catch up. To minimise clashes, we tried to stick to dates that we had in our original published schedule. Our ever-popular Double Handed Series had been due to kick off with the Spring Solent Double on 18th April. In
the event we could not restart the Series until 15th August, and even then, we could not run any races to distant destinations requiring overnight stays. The double- handed format is of course ideal for single households and social distancing! The first race of the rescheduled Series was the Island Double, which this year was transformed for safety reasons from a race Round the Island to a race within the Solent. Despite the late start we managed to get 7 races run in the Series in the remaining three months, with
a total of 53 boats entering altogether. In IRC Class 1 Bill West’s Jo Jo Gunne was the clear Series winner. In IRC Class 2 Michael Barham’s Skua IV was also a clear winner, while in Club Class 3 Mike Garvey’s Magec and Ian Roper’s Hadaway fought it out to the end, with Magec finishing up the winner.
In normal times Cowes Week in August is a major event in the calendar for our Race Management Team. We pull together a team, typically about a dozen strong, to run White Group races over several days, with a committee boat start and finish off Hill Head. Unfortunately, this year Cowes
Week had the potential to be a ‘super- spreader’ event with large numbers of crew and volunteers in close-proximity, and the organisers sensibly took the decision to cancel. This left a gaping hole in the racing calendar. To help fill this hole we teamed up with the SB20 class to run a three-day COVID-compliant regatta for them. You can read more about this in a separate article by Stephen Parry in this edition.
The last series of races we ran in 2020 was our Winter Series. Originally planned as eight races - two races a day on consecutive Sunday mornings starting on 11th October - we decided to start instead on 4th October and extend the series to ten races. We are
always subject to the vagaries of the weather, especially as we get into the colder months, and this year we had to cancel five of these ten races. Each week we ran a pursuit race followed by an average laps race with the aim of minimising the waiting time between them. The fleet was split into three classes
- two for fully crewed boats and one for those choosing to sail double-handed. We started all the boats as if they were one class so that they had the additional opportunity to be the overall winner. Class 1 - the faster fully crewed boats - were led from the first race by syndicate-owned Jackdaw with Mike Garvey’s Magec not far behind. Class 2 - the slower fully crewed boats - were led by Bob