Hansa GUL Christmas VR Series - Update after Week 6
by David Durston 23 Nov 2020 01:24 PST
As the evenings drew in and temperatures dropped there was demand from some Hansa Class members to run another Virtual Regatta series.
Typically Hansa Class UK wouldn't run real sailing events beyond September/October, although international events are sometimes later. Most, if not all Sailability groups stop for the winter months. Some people with a disability have problems with temperature regulation, and struggle to cope with the cold. So at least one good thing has come out of the pandemic; our season has been extended and our racing and continue over the winter.
We listened to our members and made some changes to the format and timings for the event. To make it more accessible for everybody we now start at 6pm and run 5 races so that we're typically finished by 7pm in time for people to have dinner. Over the 10 race series there will be 50 races, with 30 to count. The max score method has been kept so that the winner gets points equal to the number of competitors who started the race, second place gets one point less, etc. As it turned out, the 2nd lockdown has made the events very popular.
This series has seen the arrival of three new competitors from the Wolverstone Project: Richard Codling (VonPigeon), John Norman (Stormin), and Andy Beharrell (AndyBeharrell). Although new to the Hansa competition, all three came with considerable experience of Virtual Regatta, recently finishing well in the eSailing World Championship. This has made the competition even fiercer.
Paul Holzherr (herrholz), the winner of the last series, started strongly with a first place and 3 second places, but was pipped to the top spot by VonPigeon by 2 points. That set the standard for the series. The second week saw a reversal of fortunes with herrholz winning over VonPigeon by one point. After 10 races they were separated by a single point. By week 4 a gap had started to emerge with VonPigeon maintaining a consistent high standard, and other sailors upping their game to reduce the gap between them and herrholz.
Stormin did as his name suggests in weeks 4 and 5, rising up the table to just 6 points behind herrholz after 25 races. In week 6 herrholz had technical issues and failed to complete a single race, allowing Stormin to overtake him into 2nd place behind VonPigeon who is comfortably 53 points ahead. David Durston, Paul Phillips, and Rory McKinna have made some progress over the last 3 weeks, although Rory (Glasgow Bonnet) had a bit of a shocker in week 6.
There are four weeks remaining with 20 races to be competed. The discards will start to kick in from next week, so this could see some interesting changes in fortune. There are more GUL vouchers up for grabs for the top 3 sailors. Watch this space.
Results after Week 6: