Race Report, First Race
March 16 dawned with a promising day of sunshine ahead – and happily this turned out to be the case for the first race of the 2025 season. This was an A course with two buoys, one upstream of The Bell and Crown and the other by the grid.
The wind was quite variable but generally light, with none of the 7 boats which started the race at 1440 needing to retire for any reason – and hence relatively light work for Keith Clarke and Henry Brown in the safety boat.
The building work on the railway arch has made the parking and movement of boats somewhat different from usual but everyone worked deftly manoeuvring boats and trailers on the fast-disappearing foreshore at that start, and wading in the rising waters on the towpath when bringing the boats in after the race.
There were 3 Enterprises which each, at different stages in the race appeared to be leading the way, with eventually James Armitage (with Felicia Biekark as crew ) and Lev who was single handed slogging it out to the end of the race, with both completing 8 laps.
It was a delight to see two under -10’s crewing in the race (Felicity Adams completing 6 laps in Enterprise Big Polly with her grandad Rob Adams) and Kieran Biekark (crewing for Chris Greenwood in the Leader dinghy Distant Thunder) completing 7 laps.
The other 3 boats in the race were sailing single-handed with Nick Floyer (5 laps), Tim Young (5 laps) and Nick Jeffery (3 laps) each in their characterful and very different designs of boat, respectively Gull, Wanderer and Duckling.
The race was a pleasing and colourful spectacle for the many drinkers, diners and walkers along the tow path which was bathed in warm sunshine – and it was a delight to be OOD under such conditions.
Mary Short, OOD
A note on the Results Table (below). We’ve added another column to the table, the first under the Polly Prize heading, ALT, standing for Average Lap Time after Portsmouth Number calculation. Olly asked for this as it is the nearest we get to an official handicap comparison of our boats taking the wide variety of boats, handicaps and number of laps sailed.
