J24 Autumn Cup 2015

This was our first ever event away from home. Unfortunately we were unable to bring our J24 with us to the event so the class provided us with a boat for use to use for the event. We arrived at Plymouth at 11pm after a long 4 hour drive to a well earned rest before Race Day.

Day One

Alarms woke us at 6:30 to the smell of Bacon Sandwiches and sausages, whilst eating breakfast we took a look outside, the day began bright and cold yet a lack of wind, which funnily enough is essential to sailing!, but none the less we headed down to the boat for 7:20 to begin the rigging phase on a boat we have never seen before!. The first job of the day was antifoul scrub to remove all the weed and slime. When the briefing was given the forecast for the day was read. Light winds were forecast for the day.

Leaving the marina to head out to the race area we all began to feel the nervousness set in of competition. It took 40 minutes of trusty outboard power to get to the race area due to the lack of wind. Once we reached the race area racing was postponed for a while to allow the wind to settle. Race one boasted 6-8 Knots of breeze with a lot of tide. We had an okay-ish start half way through the fleet to finish the race mid fleet. They day continued with continued results of mid fleet. The wind did not improve to a consistent level either which made it slightly more frustrating! Overall we thought Day One was not a complete write off. It was the first time we had really sailed together competitively and let alone on a completely new boat.

Day two was a windy day boasting a wind strength go 17-23 knots which we didn’t mind one bit. Our first race was our best, top 10 result. But sadly the second and third races were where it went slightly downhill for us. On one of our reaches, (we may have been a bit ambitious) we had the spinnaker up and we broke the pole uphaul which made our very expensive carbon fibre pole look like spaghetti so we had to drop the kite which ultimately led to us broaching. But all in all lessons where learned. We lost out in the second race because we were unable to use the spinnaker downwind and on a reach.

Overall the Plymouth Open was a good weekend, gave us an insight to competitive J24 racing outside of Parkstone Yacht Club and brought us together as a team.

The Team:

Helm: Liam Pardy
Trim: Jacob Bennett
Pit: Harry Wilkes
Mast: Eden Luke
Bow: George Kennedy

Liam

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