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Tuesday, 26 July 2016

Commodores Weekend - wet windy but huge fun

Commodore’s weekend came and went in a flash, Saturday started with helpers clearing up the dinghy park and the club house, followed by a hearty brunch of bacon and egg / beans, another well timed delivery of good hot food by team Edmundson.

Representatives from Asda came along to present the club with a cheque for £200 in response to the green token initiative.

Heavy rain followed for a while but cleared up in time for the commodore’s charity race, very strong gusts meant that I had to spend all the time in the safety boat rescuing people from capsizes, rudder failure, and uncontrolled drifting onto the lee-shore, many thanks to Dennis and Louise for promptly standing in as OOD’s. in the end we had only 4 boats finishing the race, many retired due to the strong winds or boat gear failure.

We raised £85 and this (rounded up to £100) will be donated to the Macmillan Nurses charity. A huge thanks to all who took part.
1st – Andrew Cowling
2nd Phil Graham
3rd Gail Kaye

During most of the day, Glenis, Mary and Paul ran the YSC stall at the Yeadon carnival field, where we displayed a shiny Heron dinghy and a very clean Whalley safety boat.

The afternoon boat building event was a real test of ingenuity and initiative, some excellent and interesting designs were produced. Strong winds again made the race around No.9 exciting, a tail wind made the outbound passage quick and easy, but turning around bac k to the jetty gave the paddlers a head wind to contend with, despite frantic paddling, only slow (sometimes backwards)  progress could be made.

Best cheating – Tony, Lucy and Louise for swimming the whole course pushing the boat.
Fastest boat to No.9 – and beyond, Oscar, Olivia, Andrew and Luke.
Quickest boat to break apart – Matthew and Harry
Best design – Alex, Sarah, Richard and Jack.

Later in the evening we enjoyed a great BBQ, but we all admitted defeat to the increasing winds and we had no appetite for the midnight race, so Saturday ended earlier than usual.

Sunday saw the Star Race event for the first time at YSC, it was decided to use only toppers to make it more interesting, again the winds were strong meaning that we only had 3 finishers.

Commodore’s lunch was a big juicy burger with accompanying salads.

The bottle race saw a very competitive entry from 4 teams using toppers, this somehow ended up being only 2 teams, there was plenty of pirating and capsizes which meant there was a continual change in ownership of the bottles.

Oscar ran the mast climbing event before we put the boats away and presented prizes.









Despite the very low turn-out of members, we all had an enjoyable and fun weekend.

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