10th and 11th August 2024
Eighteen boats of which the largest fleet was the 6 International Moths (Lowriders), took to the water at Bowmoor for a joint event with the Comet fleet. There was a good variety of boats from double handers Albacore, Merlin Rocket, GP14, National 12 and Lark to Solo, Europe, British Moth and Mirror. Two International 12s, new to CVRDA events, were welcomed and it was great to have Peter Vinton back from a long lay-off due to injury in his bright red wooden Finn, Django.
The rest must have been good for Peter as he took three firsts on the Saturday, mostly leading from start to finish. However he was unable to stay for Sunday’s racing so dropped down the overall places. Ian and Lyndon in International Moths chased hard but tangled with the Comets as did Tim & Pat in Merlin Rocket 1066. Ian may have been distracted by losing his keys before racing and everyone was looking out for them throughout the event.
The Albacore dropped out on Saturday afternoon due to helm sickness but returned on Sunday to lead the last race almost from start to finish, holding off Ian and Lyndon’s Moths and only being beaten on handicap by Steve in his International 12.
Graham broke his Mistral design Moth in the first race and, realising it couldn’t just be fixed with duck tape, decided to chill out and enjoyed the weeked from the shore apart from an after-racing trial in Lyndon’s Stockholm Sprite design Moth, which convinced Graham that he wanted to build one!
Meg and Sam borrowed a Lark (thanks to John Beresford) which had been rigged by Ian with help from various people. They put together a consistent set of results after recovering from a swim (intentional!) in race one when the spinnaker refused to lower and Sam had to swim along the mast and untie the halyard!
David and Debbie in March Hare, the original of that National 12 design, also sailed a good series to take 6th place overall, as did Rob in the Europe taking 8th. Henry in the Skol 3 design Moth managed to finish all races despite struggling as a lightweight and came 14th overall to claim the persistance prize – lowest place finishing all races.
In the International 12s, Steve sailed consistently well single-handed to take overall third place on a (generous) trial handicap whilst Danny sailed with a different crew each day to come 13th with a string of 13th places apart from a 7th in the final race.
Thanks go to Ian and Wendy and the Bowmoor team who organised an excellent event and the weather enabled everyone to enjoy the sailing and the socialising. And finally, after prizegiving, Ian’s keys were found by two youngsters, having fallen into a pocket of the pool table!
Bowmoor rally results – these may differ very slightly from those published on the day due to computer issues at the time causing them to be manually calculated on remembered handicaps. These are now calculated on the correct handicaps. Prizewinners are unchanged.