So after almost a year of talking about it, the sailing sub have decided upon the locations of the marks for this season. They have also concluded that changing the lettering on the current race marks would be a lot of work and as we are adding a handful of new ones we probably have enough to do. Perhaps this could be something that we discuss this season, with a view to doing something different next season. Mark names perhaps………discuss this among yourselves and please let us know what you think, your fleet captains are dying to talk to you about it.
The diagram above shows the intended positions of the race marks for 2019. As already mentioned we have some new race marks to construct for this season which along with the painting of the existing marks requires volunteers. If we get enough help we may be able to lay all of the above marks, if we don’t we might be missing a few, so please volunteer to help – a good time to do this is at the working parties which are this weekend and the following weekend as detailed in the club calendar.
One of the aims of the mark positions is to enable the setting of more short courses, and also some more interesting longer courses – I guess we will see how we go and adapt accordingly if required. For instance when laying the marks we sometime discover that the water isn’t deep enough where we would like to lay a mark, the river bed changes all the time and we have to change with it.
One thing to note is that the marks at positions R and D will dry out at low tides – something new again we haven’t done this before, R mark in particular will be very useful at high tide though.
If you don’t race much or haven’t raced at all then perhaps you should change that this season, everyone is going to have new things to get used to, so in some respects we are all in the same boat. Racing really is the very best way to make quick improvements to your sailing and racing a MSC is very friendly especially in the short course fleet where most of the rules are applied very loosely.
The race mark positions are shown above and are also available as a .pdf and .png below.