Club Championship 2009 - September 19

The end of September is always highlighted in our agenda. After a season of training and sailing and training and sailing we can finally race to our fullest and enjoy the annual Club Championship at our club VVW Heist.

The week leading up to the event was very exciting. The wind predictions were first indicating that it would blow, 6 BFT. In the middle of the week this got scaled down to 4 BFT, ideal conditions for us! By Friday evening though they were only predicting 2 à 3 BFT anymore. And when we got up on Saturday morning there was... NO WIND, bummer!

This led to hours of waiting on the beach, everyone (18 boats registered!) nervously watching the windsock, the predictions, each other... Some were already converting to Beer instead of Sailing, confident there would be a postponement. I sure hoped racing could go on. I felt like racing and the postponement would not come in handy since we were keen on sailing in Holland during the month of October.

Finally at 3 PM a decision was made: we were going to try and race. Everyone out on the water and we managed to race, yeah! The wind was very little (just 2 BFT probably) so it made for 3 very nerve wrecking races. We were literally crawling over the field. If someone made a good decision and found some more wind somewhere else on the field, it could all quickly turn around.

Conclusion of the 3 races: WE WON!! :-)
We scored a 2nd place, a 3rd place and a 2nd place. Due to a DSQ of the team that was just before us, we skipped over them and we won. On a second place team Nele De Somer/Pieter Vandendriessche with their Hobie Tiger. On a third place we had Werner and co on his nice carbon Eagle, very slick boat!

Results can be found here.

Evening festivities were very fun, especially for us, since we got to go home with a beautiful trophy. You can see this special trophy on these pictures.



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