Around mid-afternoon today (Wednesday) the anemometers at Sherkin Island, Cork Airport and Roche’s Point were all showing quite decent sailing breezes. Grand day for a spot of steady yacht racing all along the magic Cork coast, you might reasonably think. Well, not quite……
For the wind being recorded at Sherkin was westerly. Up at Cork airport meanwhile, it was northerly. And almost within sight at Roche’s Point, where they’d the best breeze of all, it was t’other way completely – a straight southerly. Quite a challenge for the tacticians, and plain murder for race officers. Yet despite that, the interesting fleet in the Cork Week IRC Coastal Class got a result which – at this halfway-plus stage of the week – reflected the trends of earlier racing while shaking things up in a way that indicated there had been right and not-so-right and even wrong ways to go.
Jamie McWilliam of the Royal Fragrant Harbour YC was out of sight ahead at the finish with his Ker 40 Signal 8. But then with a rating of 1.242, he has to be if he’s going to be in the money, and that’s where he was, first by three minutes on CT ahead of Steve Hayes from Greystones with Magic Touch which rates only 0.979, while Steady Eddy, aka Peter Dunlop of Pwllheli with the J/109 Mojito, took third to stay in the top three overall, which at this stage has Signal 8 on 8pts, Mojito on 9, and Paul & Deirdre Tingle’s Alpaca from the host club on 15.