Pam and Noela won!

Let's get straight to the nub of the matter. Noela and I won the under CCH .650 trailer sailor division of the Clarence River Yacht Club Brushgrove Anniversary Race on the 27th February (the anniversary of what I never found out).

I arrived as directed at the Kirchner Road boat ramp in Grafton on Friday afternoon so that I had time to socialise and prepare at my leisure for the race the following day. Unfortunately the forecast was for very light SE winds as well as showers. The forecast turned out all too accurate. Heavy showers and too little wind.

Once rigged, launched and moored stern to shore tucked into the reeds, it was time to explore the Clarence River Yacht Club. Their "new" clubhouse is the abandoned Scout Hall. I think the real estate assessment would be "could do with some TLC", but it provided the basics, toilets, showers and a canteen. The main drawback was the sewage treatment plant next door. The place was decidedly on the nose. Helen and Don McLeod and Andrew Landenberger made the visitors welcome and worked extremely hard to make the event a great success.

Noela arrived on Saturday morning and we went to the briefing together. The course was pretty simple. As a trailer sailor with a CCH under .650 (according to Top Yacht software mine is .557) I was told I could make my own decision to shorten course at the first mark at Ulmarra (around 10 km) or continue to the next mark half way to Brushgrove (around 16 km) or even keep going to Brushgrove (20+ km). I reckon I might have got all the way to Brushgrove in ideal conditions, but conditions were far from ideal on the 27th February.

The fleet consisted of 6 trailer sailors and 24 catamarans sailing in a separate event. The cats were going all the way to Brushgrove and the fastest even further to Lawrence.

We nearly retired before the start. The line that holds the rudder down gave way and I wasn't able to steer. However we managed to work around the problem and although steering remained a bit of a problem we coped.

The trailer sailor start was at 1 pm. There were only two of us ready on time. Both the start boat and the rest of the fleet were late. It was a pleasant fantasy that we could have legitimately got a 15 minute head start if we had started on time leaving the laggards to catch up. As it was we all started together about 15 mins late. We managed to get over the line third.

The cats started 5 mins after the trailer sailors and even in the light airs it didn't take them long to streak ahead. We tried hard to keep us with the other trailer sailors but to no avail, they slowly pulled ahead. We were (as in the Bridge to Breakers) the tail enders.

As we neared Ulmarra the wind shifted from SE to E so we had to tack backwards and forwards to make the mark. To my surprise I saw that we were slowly catching up two of our competitors. We rounded the mark at Ulmarra ahead of those two yachts. By that time the we had been sailing for 2 hours and were becalmed. Noela and I made a joint decision to shorten course and hope to get back to base before dark without resorting to the motor. For a while that didn't seen probable as the tide was carrying us towards Brushgrove. After about half an hour an E breeze sprung up, the best wind of the day. We were on a run back to the finish line 10 kms away. We don't have a spinnaker but we can and did goose wing the jib using the modified boat hook as a whisker pole.

For a while we had the strange experience of leading the fleet back home (at least until some cats flew past). The other yachts had headed on past the Ulmarra mark towards the next mark before race control officially shortened the course for all.

These photographs were taken by some race officials who came zooming up in a speedboat to check up on us. Great. It is hard to get photos of one's own boat underway. Andrew Landenberger made our sails and I hope he reckons they are setting OK.

It was a buzz to see Helen wave our yellow class flag as we crossed the finish line. We had done it. We had finished as far as we knew without breaking any rules.

I was thrilled when Little Dragon was announced to be first in our division (OK, I know that there were only 3 in the division). It is the first time since I was a teenager almost 50 years ago that I have won any sporting event. I just want to enjoy the moment and not reflect on some mutterings about different handicapping systems. Thanks Noela we make a great team and I am sorry you had to leave before the presentation.