Team Racing

At 7:45 am, having spent a large proportion of the previous night rewiring a lighting board socket, on recieving a phone call from Hugh to say that his lighting board was now not working, and looking out into the rain with the knowledge that the BBC was predicting a whole 5mph of wind for the day, driving 90 miles north to Derwent Reservoir for team racing didn't sound terribly enticing!

But we went, and good fun it was too! Despite the constant drizzle, it only really rained properly on us a couple of times, and we hardly noticed as our attention was more closely focused on going as fast as possible and destroying the opposition!

There were four teams in total; YRISC, one from Scaling and two from Derwent. As per usual, the OD was slightly random - rules appeared half way through which hadn't mentioned at the start (apparently, going through the starting gate on the running leg was not on), and some of them favoured us (all the lemmings in our race were disqualified apart from us!), but I think that we missed out on even finding out about half of them.

We calculated that we had won 4 out of 6 races - having beaten one team on both attempts - but somehow that meant that we finished in last place.

But it was really good fun, especially in the last seconds of the final race, when Ian and I careered along the finish line on a starboard tack yelling at the top of our voices at the line of GPs on port heading towards us. Chaos ensued, and there was a ridiculous amount of tacking into each other's water, but by the time we were all over the line there was raucous laughter from every boat! That's what team racing is all about!