The 7th SOPS race was held on Saturday the 21st March. With another light wind forecast, the race committee sensibly set a relatively short course from the start at Barrenjoey, with a work down to Newport reef and a downwind return to the finish at Barrenjoey.
Of course the forecast and the reality didn’t exactly line up.
We had a light South Easterly at the gun and started tacking our way down the coast, some sticking inshore and others going straight offshore. The offshore option proved to be the best, with a 2.2 knot southerly current and a 10 knot easterly the boats out to sea took off. We worked our way out and played catch up, as the wind offshore continued to build and go further to the east we got the kite up for the last part of the leg. The return leg was now on the wind with a north easterly, and as the boats made their way back towards Barrenjoey the wind completely died. The bulk of the fleet were parked off Palm Beach, we were a bit further south off Whale beach and had a great view, but no wind. A few boats started retiring, but there was lots of cloud building up to the west and we held on.
Eventually our patience was rewarded and we could see a bit of breeze start to fill in to the south east, so back up with the kite and we were off. We came around the headland south of Palm Beach at 7 knots to see most of the fleet still parked up, we had a good lay line into the finish pin and bought the breeze with us to a really close finish.
Windy Too and Quantock had held the breeze to finish 30 minutes earlier, but Ascalon, Banter, Xcalibur, LCE Old School Racing and Mercury were within seconds of each other after just on 4 hour of racing.
PHS Results 1st Maggie 2nd Veloce 3rd Xcalibur
IRC 1st Veloce 2nd Windy Too 3rd Quantock
ORC 1st Veloce 2nd Windy Too 3rd Maggie
