Sailing and Social Report 12-Feb-19

Team racing at Chew

Sailing Club News – 12-Feb-19

Once again the weather has done its best to disrupt the Club’s best laid plans.
After the unexpectedly heavy snowfall on Thursday night, the Bristol University team organising the BUSA team racing trials on the 2nd/3rd February decided to postpone to their reserve weekend.
A decision was taken to close the Club on Saturday due to the difficult access along the drive and the snow covering the slipways. As it happened, sailing was cancelled on the Sunday with the lake partially frozen over – check out the amazing drone footage currently on Facebook.

Happily, normal service was resumed last weekend – Helen had returned from holiday looking refreshed and raring to go – and there were juniors training on Saturday and a healthy turnout of racers on Sunday. It was good to see so many Solos emerging from hibernation to get some practice in for their up-coming Winter Championships.

So, what have we to look forward to?

BUSA South West team racing trials – 16/17-Feb-19

This is the reserve weekend for the students mentioned above.
There will be 20 or so teams of 6 from Universities across the South West gathering for an intense weekend of team racing to decide which teams go forward to the BUSA finals at Easter.
Team racing is always good spectator sport, and great for learning about and actually seeing the racing rules in dynamic action. Come along and support our own Chew teams from Bristol, Bath and UWE.

Also on Sunday 17-Feb-19 – the second Class Race Day of this year

I hope to see a good turnout of racers in all our fleets for this traditional 3 Race day, with prizes presented to the winners at the end. The lake will be busy with the BUSA racing happening at the same time, but with experienced Race Officer, Pete Sherwin, in charge, a good day’s racing is guaranteed.

Wednesday 20-Feb-19 – Quiz night – Bar and Galley open from 6.30, Quiz starts at 7.00

John Kelly and Ruth Kenyon are the quizmasters for the evening, and have been busy devising questions to tax even the most experienced quizzers.
Rob will have the galley up and running from 6.30.
£1 per person will be donated to the RNLI as well as entering you in a raffle. Prizes will be awarded at the end.
Teams will be made up on the night so please come along and support what promises to be the highlight of the Wednesday Warmer evenings.

(Please note that the 3rd Winter Warmer, planned for the 20-Mar-19, has been cancelled. I hope we will be able to re-schedule Hugh’s talk for later in the year).

Saturday 23-Feb-19 – Solo Winter Championships

This traditional season opening event for the Solos usually attracts a good turnout. The race team has a large contingent of our RS200 sailors marshalled by fleet captain James Williams.
Racing will start at 11.00 so, if you don’t have one of these particular galleons, come along and cheer for a Chew winner!

Wednesday 27-Feb-19 and 27-Ma-19 – Race Officer Update evenings

These evenings are aimed at our Club Race Officers and those who opt for the Assistant Race Officer duties but would like to step up to the mark and join the elite Race Officer rota.
Keith Harris, our principal race officer, will talk about the new systems on the committee boat, our revised club sailing instructions and changes to the rules guidance on running races.
Chris Goldhawk (and his imminent successor, Bill Chard), will talk about the Sailwave results programme we use.
The bar and galley will be open from 6.30 for a 7pm start.
Please let me know if you are planning to come, and which evening you have chosen – Vice-commodore@chewvalleysailing.org.uk

A note from our duties secretary, Tom Skailes

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that we have uploaded the full programme of duties for the 2019-20 season to Dutyman.
The benefit of this is that, if you wish, you can self-select your duties/dates in advance, by using the ‘volunteer for a duty’ feature on Dutyman – so you can take account of dates in the year you will not be available, or make sure your duty is on the same day as your regular crew/helm etc. NB do not volunteer for Race Officer, Senior ARO, or Rescue Helm duties unless you have been approved by CVLSC to do these.

Duties volunteered for in this way will be counted towards your annual 2-3 duties tally when we roster, so if you self-select 2 duties in the 2019-20 season, there’s a reasonable chance you won’t be randomly rostered for another duty that year. You can volunteer for a duty at any time through the season, however, we aim to maintain a full duty roster to 3-4 months ahead of the current date, so the range of choice will reduce through the year.

We will be rostering the April/May duties very soon, so if you do not intend to renew your membership, please email both the membership secretary and the duty secretary to advise us of this:
membership@chewvalleysailing.org.uk
duties@chewvalleysailing.org.uk

Juniors and Youths

For the winter and frostbite series the juniors and youths have a separate trophy series overlaid on the regular racing. The remaining dates are:

• 20-Jan-19 – Frostbite Morning 2 & Afternoon 2
• 17-Feb-19 – Class Race Day (first 2 races of the day)
• 31-Mar-19 – Frostbite Morning 11 and Afternoon 11 plus Prizegiving

All junior/youth boats will start in A handicap (inc 29ers, Fevas, Toppers, Optimists and Lasers). With the exception that if Lasers are racing the same course as the A handicap, the Lasers can elect to start with the Laser fleet.
If a Laser starts with the A handicap fleet, the RO needs to record their elapsed time in sailwave in the Laser fleet and then overwrite this with an OCS code so the main series still works (you can’t change their fleet or have elapsed time and positions mixed up in a fleet – sailwave can’t cope). If they start with the Lasers, then the RO needs to take a time, record the elapsed time in sailwave and then overwrite it with their Laser position in sailwave. Nick Edmonds will then extract the results into the sailwave file created for the Youth series and publish the results separately.

It only remains to keep all our fingers crossed for some Spring sunshine and fair winds for the next couple of weeks!
John Smalley – vice-commodore@chewvalleysailing.org.uk