St Helena Cup 2011
We had much better results this year on Shazza than last year. Firstly, the keel has stayed in the boat (see previous posts) and secondly we finished both the Saturday and Sunday races.
The results were interesting also.
Saturday 22 October
Day one and the image below of Tokyo Trash Baby was as close as we got to them all race, they just steadily walked away from us with a small but consistent speed edge on Shazza.
The above image shows just a handfull of the 76 competitors in the Monohull division. In the image is a Shaw 650, a Thompson 7 and an Elliott 7-- yep all of them beat us easily ;)
Above is Tokyo to leeward of us, this is about as close as we got before they really started stretching out to a 5 odd minute win at the end of the 3 odd hour race. The breeze was 10-15 knots and was a mostly windward race with a good fun kite ride at the end. Handicap results were very good; Tokyo 3rd and Shazza 15th.Sunday 23 October.
Race 2 was a lighter breeze of 8-10 knots and this was an advantage to Shazza with a lighter crew, we also tweaked our mast tension to get the main working a little better. It seemed we just exchanged results from the previous day as Shazza led from the start gun and just had a little speed edge over Tokyo Trash Baby on the second day and ended up with a race win over 3.5 hours of about 7 minutes. The handicap results were Shazza 14th and Tokyo 57th (which really doesn't reflect the race, they weren't physically that far behind).
Over-all race results at the moment are unknown. But the difference between Tokyo Trash Baby and Shazza over 6-7hours of racing was about 2 minutes -- That is very bloody close in anyone's book I think.
