On the first L2S Saturday of the year it was great to see Opti’s, a Minnow and a couple of Quests out on the water. Mike W does a fantastic job organising and arranging the learn to sail program. Thanks also to those who came down on Sunday and assisted Mike as he had a group of Scouts to try sailing in what turned out to be pretty miserable and wet conditions and which was finally abandoned as thunder was heard approaching. This gave the eight scouts and two leaders a chance to get into the sausages ready to feed and warm them. They got through 40 snags.

On Saturday, in contrast to last week when Division 2 outnumbered Division 1, Division 1 outnumbered Division 2 to the extent that Tony C volunteered to not sail as the sole D2 representative, but rather assist your Scribe as he ran the race. Peter E had asked the Scribe late Friday to step in so there was not a great deal of thought save that on Saturday morning he considered things over a cup of coffee and wondered why we did triangles and why we couldn’t do, say, a square. So Tony and I set a square and thought it went quite well when only 20% of sailors in both races forgot that the start mark, clearly labelled “s” on the white board, and noted in the briefing, was a mark which they must round. In race 1 Peter E was tantalisingly close to rounding the “s” mark and only missed it by 5 metres or so. That he didn’t round the mark makes you wonder why he was close to it when a direct course to the next mark would have been straight up the middle. In race 2 Tim Waller (great to see him at sailing) was leading the race officers to bet that he would foul the SI by crossing the finish when not finishing when he tacked away and we thought he knew what was going on and that he’d then tack to the “s” mark. He didn’t. Visitor Ron F, Manfred and John W all got it right.

It was a day for Aero 7’s as they cruised through the light conditions with Ron F winning both races and Tim coming in second. Full rigs swapped positions in both races with race 1 having Manfred ahead of John W with Peter E trailing and race 2 having John W ahead of Peter E with Manfred trailing.

We had planned to have a third race and were re-laying a couple of marks and had put up our ‘on position’ start flag and even blown the horn, but none save Ron F twigged what we were doing and when all others had beached even Ron thought we could call it a day.

Thanks to Tony on Ozone, Alex in the tower and Julie supplying hot stuff after the day’s racing.
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Coming up:
Saturday 1 November 2025.
1400 Ozone series continues (includes Boat Club Cup).

Saturday 8 November 2025.
1400 Ozone series continues.
0900 Junior and Senior L2S

With no sailing over the winter your scribe had a bit of spare time which he put to use by borrowing a couple of books from the Club so he could learn to navigate. Here are some of the things he learnt:
You might wonder why the bother when GPS electronics are all over the place. But what if power fails and what if an error is made.

So here is a very short overview of what you are doing, and it’s easier to start in the northern hemisphere where there is a star, called the North Star, at the North celestial pole which means it appears stationary. If you get your protractor out and measure the angle it is above you, then that will give you a latitude of how far above the equator you are. Nautical tables, worked out by generations of midshipmen, convert angle into degree of latitude. (You use different stars and times in the southern hemisphere). And if you know that it is midday where you are, and the sun is straight up and you know the time in Greenwich (the prime meridian) then you can work out your longitude as after crossing the Greenwich meridian at noon GMT (12.00), the sun moves westward covering 15 degrees of longitude every hour. The difference in time will give you so many lots of 15 degrees and fractions giving longitude.