2018 RYA Team Racing Championships at Spinnaker Sailing Club
by Nigel Vick 20 Mar 2018 07:35 PDT
17-18 March 2018
2018 RYA Team Racing Championships at Spinnaker Club © Nigel Vick
The 2018 RYA Team Racing Championships were hosted by Spinnaker Sailing Club over the weekend of March 10/11.
Team Racing is a discipline where teams of three boats sail each other and the score of the team is what matters, so it may be more important to slow a member of the other team down, allowing members of your team to gain places, thereby improving your teams overall score. This makes for very tactical racing.
The full entry of 24 teams were divided into four seeded groups, based on their past record. Each team sailed against every other team in their group with positions being determined by the number of race wins, or points scored. There was also an experiment at "crowd seeding" by taking competitors assessment of their opponents ability.
With the Firefly dinghies sporting cut-down sails, Stage 1 of the competition comprising 60 races was completed by 2pm on Saturday and the Second stage with Gold, Silver and Bronze Leagues was started. An additional 36 races from Stage 2 were completed on the Saturday in some very cold conditions.
Overnight it snowed, and with a forecast of more to come and strong winds the race officer, Jo Sammons, decided to abandon the rest of the event, so that sailors could get home safely. However, the schedule provided by www.ksail.co.uk, had Stage 2 being front loaded towards the Gold league, so it was possible to obtain a result.
The winners were The West Kirby Hawks (Andy Cornah, Ben Field and Dom Johnson) who were undefeated in Stage 2 and had sailed 5 matches. They are now the current holders of the Prince Philip Trophy.
A huge thank you is due to all of the Spinnaker Sailing Club members who assisted in some terrible weather and to Ed Morris in particular who spent three days getting boats and everything in shape.