Your scribe had taken the opportunity to visit Phillip Island with family ,including grandchildren, and for New Year’s Eve, was able to take the grandchildren to see the fireworks display and again prove he has no idea how to photograph fireworks. They were duly impressed although to those older nothing will ever match the display when something went wrong and they tried to burn down the then timber jetty with $15,000 worth of fireworks. The sight of five or six pyrotechnicians haring shorewards down the jetty leaving smoke, flames and exploding fireworks at the far end remains etched in many memories. (Only dignity was harmed). So your scribe didn’t get to sailing last Saturday.

But others did with John W, Lucy, Billy and Ollie taking to the water in a fleet of three Sabres and one full rig Laser doing three races. Anyone sailing the Laser won the Div 1 races, so John won the first, and with John and Lucy swapping boats, Lucy won the next two. Division 2 actually had some racing although Billy pulled out during the first race. Ollie was a mere 9 seconds up on Lucy in Race 1, repeated by a minute over John in Race 2, but was behind John by 13 seconds in Race 3. You can’t tell from this distance but I wonder if there was not a bit of match racing going on.

I assume that Andrew D ran the races as he forwarded the results. Thanks Andrew.

Coming up:

Saturday 11 January 2025.
1400 Matthew Flinders series commences

Saturday 18 January 2025.
1400 Matthew Flinders series continues (incorporates Commodore Cup)

And in a new and occasional bit:
Your Scribe has decided that he often gets things wrong and he would be wise to write down any hints and learnings soon after a race for review, this is a progression to a ‘professional attitude’ to sailing; and he is prepared to share them with you as a learning experience; and as the New Year brings broken resolutions, the end of a proper test series and to those of us who sail, an updated Racing Rules of Sailing, so:
Learning 28
RRS 17 ON THE SAME TACK; PROPER COURSE
If a boat clear astern becomes overlapped within two of her hull lengths to leeward of a boat on the same tack, she shall not sail above her proper course while they remain on the same tack and overlapped within that distance, unless in doing so she promptly sails astern of the other boat. This rule does not apply if the overlap begins while the windward boat is required by rule 13 to keep clear. (words struck through deleted)
Commentary:
The rule now applies even to overlaps that begin when a windward boat is required to keep clear by rule 13 meaning the leeward boat cannot sail above her proper course.
(Commentary provided by Captain Tribhuwan Jaiswal, IJ, Mumbai, India) (and found, I think, on Sailing Anarchy website)
(Scribe’s thought: Does this mean that the old fashioned, and beloved by US tacticians of the fifties and sixties and Manfred Curry, “luff” is now redundant?)