Three of the Youth squad (Ethan, Lottie Winfindale and David Rodger) took part in the end of season Junior traveller event at Bolton SC on Saturday.
Weather was medium wind with a few very strong squalls giving many spectacular capsizes. That there were no breakages say much of the good design of modern boats. (Optimist, Topper, RS Feva, Laser, Hartley 12, 420 and Supernova)
Bolton is a very small sailing club but it still has 12 main buoys and temporary buoys and the OOD intended using most of them. Each race more and more of the club bouys were being used to the utter confusion of most of the kids.
For the last race the OOD put the start line across both upwind legs having initially failed to put the start line on the course board at all. It appears that the direction arrows were not clear either.
At times the whole of the Topper Fleet were sailing the course in reverse order, and our youth squad were perhaps more confused than the more experienced kids.
At other times some of the leaders were spending more time unravelling themselves of the wrong course than they were sailing the right course.
The lead boat of course led the experienced Laser Fleet around but left the Toppers and Optimists to find their own way…