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The 2024 Dart 18 inland nationals were held at Casington sailing club in Derbyshire.
2 Boats travelled from the RYYC, Kev & Reggie Porter and Duncan Baines. only 7 Dart 18’s had entered, but the forecast looked promising and the typical Friday night festivities began in earnest with 2 bottle of Kracken consumed,
Saturday awoke to some sore heads but a nice 4- 6 Bft with Blue skys and sunshine, it looked perfect for sailing.
Racing got underway as planned and the crews quickly realised it was going to be frustrating, with a square course set the wind direction proved to be difficult and the gust more so, flueky winds especially around the 1st windward mark made for some quite dramatic changes in position, in some cases from first to last, but with the added bonus of some screaming reaches in between all while avoiding the Slower dart 15 fleet.
2 races down and the last race underway the skys started to turn dark and the wind started increaseing, with the met office issuing weather warnings for heavy rain and thunder earlier in the morning, the competitors found themselfs being chased down by the safety Ribs and being told to head to shore immediatly due to Lightning being sighted by the race commitee, Just what you need sat in the middle of a lake with a big metal mast ……
No sooner had all boats made it safely ashore, the havens opened with torrential rain, and then the real storm started, the thunder and lightning lasted around 5-6 hours, however the club house was warm and dry and the bar most welcoming.
Sunday dawned to very high winds, with some guys packing up and going even before hitting the water, the remaining boats hit the water to find it boardering on it being survial weather, but we made it to the first start and the race committee dids a fine job of getting us racing.
The first beat to windward was not much fun, Heading up wind with the travellor almost fully out while still trapezing and flying a hull always seams to pose the question of why are we out here ?, One of the single handers capsized half way up the 1st beat by the time we go down to the 1st bottom mark Kev and Reggie saw sense and headed for the shore, Duncan managed to wrangle it round the course enough times to get a finish but headed straight in afterwards leaving only 4 boats to race the final 2 races.
Des Barnes and Fionnuala were clear winners with a 1st in 5 out of the 6 races, well Done 🙂 A fantastic weekend was had by all.
Overall: 1st – Des & Fionnuala Barnes 2nd – Ezri Hemsworth & Rach Meddick 3rd – Chris & Will Aspinall
Handicaps: 1st Handicap – Alan Holmes & Colin Thackeray 2nd Handicap- Duncan Baines 3rd Handicap – Kev & Reggie Porter
