We travelled to Hayling Island for the second of this years selection series weekends. We arrived to a windy, but sunny boat park. Our boat was already rigged from a few days sailing last weekend and so we set about getting the rig ready for a windy days sailing.

Hayling Island is a notoriously difficult venue to sail at with a bar of shallow water kicking the waves up outside the safety of the harbour.

The combination of high waves and shallow water has claimed many rigs (7 29er masts in one day once) and with large breaking waves visible from the clubhouse the race officer postponed racing in the hope that the tidal conditions would be right to sail in the harbour that afternoon.

But at 14.30 the wind had not moderated and it looked set to continue gusting at around 30kts so racing was abandoned and the rest of the afternoon was spent fiddling with boats.

8.30 am on Sunday morning and the fleet woke to slightly less breeze, but still a steady 20kts gusting 25. The breaking waves over the bar seemed even bigger than Saturday. A crazy gust of 48kts at 10 o’clock seemed to make up the race officers mind and he abandoned the event at 11 am.

Sitting on the beach ready to go is pretty tortuous, but I guess its better than snapping the new rig! We’re hoping for better luck next weekend when we are training at Draycote.

Best regards,
Rich and Tom