Once again the Heineken Regatta Day 2 began very early. I knew that the coffee ashore would be rubbish, so had my caffeine fix prior to taking the dinghy to the dock. The croissants, pain au chocolat and raisin rolls were good enough to lure me into the volunteer area.
We left the dock with full crew and exited with the 8AM bridge. The ride out to the anchoring spot was fast and our skipper managed to put is within 8 meters of the published GPS coordinates – not an easy task considering anchoring depth, winds and tides!
We had some aggressive racers and some very close starts, several with OCS. That stands for boats that went over the start line before the start signal. “On Course Side”. Overall it was a day of perfect sailing conditions and great competition on the water.
Some of the classes that we started ended up finishing with the finish boat. Most of them finished at our boat and had several races during the course of the day. We did have times where the finishing boats and those about to start interfered a bit with each other. Particularly the big and fast Volvos sliced through the fleets of smaller and slower boats. Fortunately there were no collisions or even near-collisions. That shows the level of expertise at the helm in all of the boats from the little 24 feet trimarans to the 70 foot behemoths.
