Our Winter Series is hot

by Peter Hackett on 28 Jun 2012 Just like the other great pictures and stories appearing on these pages during the cooler months, we think our Queensland Cruising Yacht Club winter series at Shorncliffe is one of the coolest.

This is in spite of many of the crews being able to sail in T-shirts! The first heat a few weeks back finished just before a glassout, so it was a great relief to get two solid windward-leeward races in last weekend in a classic building south-westerly blasting the froth off the water polarised by a clear blue sky.

A splendid fleet of rarely seen equal numbers of monohulls and multihulls have collected from northern NSW up to the Sunshine Coast, and we were even blessed last weekend by a visit from Keith Glover and Trilogy, fine tuning his canting rig in the fibre-stretching puffs. Two OMR bullets rewarded him for the fast trip across the bay from Manly, although Tony Goschnick still holds the overall OMR mantle on 'Outrage'.

Although there are plenty of fast boats blasting around the cans, the focus of this series is on the fun and the rolling PCF results. Div I monohulls are being led so far by Ian Colquhoun’s ex IOR Davidson 34 'Invader', Div II by Ron Walker in his Blazer 'Grumpy', and multihulls Zebb Peters’ 'Turning Point', which showed remarkable improvement when he missed one race….

This weekend’s heat is a passage race to Scarborough for a few rums and an overnight there before a return Otter Rock Plate back to Shorncliffe, and it looks like the weather gods are going to break this London weather pattern for us to don the T-shirts again.