Thelma was over crewed so we decided to take the mighty roval out for her first race…. To Patio Bay After a hideous O’clock start we motored up to the start area off orakei about 1.5 hours ahead of our start… sadly this was not over excitement, but necessary to get ahead of the harbour being closed for the harbour swim!! The evil handicappers had decided that Roval may be fast… so our mark Foy start time was about 2nd last of the whole fleet… even behind Thelma! Though I am reliability informed that a bottle of rum will fix this for the next race … so, as one by one, they all sailed off into the distance, we finally got underway at 11:08:19 …yes the seconds are very important apparently! The next “first” for Roval was to put the spinnaker up. Having never done this, and the boat not really being rigged for it, this was a bit of a jury rig effort… but after about 30 minutes of head scratching, discussion and debate… Simon, Giles and Lovise had the big red kite up and flying…yippee… speed went from 2 knts to 4 knts… I probably need to point out that there was about 7knts of breeze at this point, so not bad for a fat bottomed girl! We managed to overtake a couple of boats, but after about an hour, what little wind there was had died out… and when we found ourselves DFL because everyone behind us had retired, we decided to ensure we got a good anchorage at Patio bay. So hoisted the iron spinnaker and headed for the party…. Where of course we all drank tea, and went to bed early (and if you believe that, you’ll believe anything ;-) ) |
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