After a hazy start, day two of the McDougall McConaghy 2016 International Moth Australian Championship was a much better day for racing out on the Swan river in Perth, WA.
Around midday a light and shifty breeze filled in from around 290 degrees enabling the PRO Les Swinton to bang off four short races to keep the series on track.
The patchy 7 – 11 knot breeze was just enough for most of the fleet to get foiling but the race course was still tough to read and involved keeping the head out of the boat to search for the shifts, (much easier to do when foiling 1m above the water!). After the third race of the day the sea breeze threatened with a big shift to 245 degrees and a cool feel to go with it but it really didn’t establish above 12 knots.
The starts again proved crucial and Josh Mcknight (NSW) showed his class with three straight bullets and a 3rd to lead the championship by 8 points. His boat handling is a class apart but he was pushed hard by Rob Gough (TAS) who scored consistently with (2,3,6,2) for the day. Rob sits in second overall with 16 points.
The top international sailor Ed Chapman from Great Britain also had an excellent day moving up from 18th overall yesterday to third today. He scored (8,2,1,3). When asked about his speed on the water today Ed explained:
“A nice day on the water, I think everyone was powered up nothing like yesterday. Today was quite a lot like when I am sailing in the UK, its quite like lake sailing so as long as you have your head out the boat, you can spot the shifts and be able to do ok. You can pull yourself back through the fleet. In a couple of races I didn’t manage to get off the start line like I would have liked but still managed to battle through and get a result.”
On his starting strategy;
“I was pretty conventional on the starts today, massively low risk. You want to be foiling with about 10 – 15 seconds to go, especially in this type of breeze. Then you really need to control your speed so that you are not covering too much distance to the pin and not burning your options.”
Most of the other leading competitors picked up at least one double digit result. Local WA sailor Steve Thomas suffered in the last race of the day to drop to fourth overall shared with Andrew ‘Amac’ McDougall who had to drop his DNC in the first race, both remain in the hunt.
The second international sailor and going well is Kohei Kajimoto of Japan who is also in the mix in seventh overall.
Of the ladies, class secretary, Emma Jane Spiers (NSW) sits in 27th just three places in front of Wakako Tabata of Japan.
So some tired mothies returned ashore for more snags and Matso beer and to share tuning tips, settings, fiddle with rigs etc etc and prepare for day three on Wednesday with a race start time of 1300 hrs local.
For full results and more info go to: www.sopyc.com.au
Drone video of the day by Skyworks WA: https://vimeo.com/150785241
By Jonny Fullerton, Grand Prix Sailing
