Meanderings: A competitive day!

Awoke to a beautiful morning at Eagle Point. It's been a while since we saw one of those! It turned into a busy day though, as you will see...

A peaceful start. At anchor off Eagle Point

Even this wasn't without its challenges however, we noticed that the water around the boat was teeming with jellyfish, but didn't think that was a problem because no one was planning on swimming. We didn't think about flushing the toilet though and guess what, yup, a jellyfish, or at least parts of it, got sucked into the toilet water intake and gummed the works up for a while. Fortunately a few repeated flushes seemed to sort it out...


A rather disappointing photo of bits of jellyfish appearing in the toilet - now that is a first!

So we went ashore for a wander in the sunshine and found that this idyllic part of the world had been chosen by 4 of the local primary schools for the start/finish point of their annual cross country running meet and that within an hour or so there would be a couple of hundred school kids camped out at "our" jetty. They were very friendly though and our kids were invited to take part. EV and Arthur took up the offer and competed in their first ever cross country runs. I think they found it harder than they expected, but they both tried really hard and I'm sure they'll be back for more.

Going ashore. The runners are starting to gather.

Grade 1 boys race - about 1km. On your marks!

Arthur in action!

Arthur is all grins

EV preparing for her start - 3km ahead of her in the 9 & 10 year old girls' race

EV in action!

Made it!

We also got spotted by a local reporter for the "Bairnsdale Advertiser" who interviewed us about our journey and took some photos. Who knows, maybe we will become world famous in Bairnsdale, we shall see...

OK, so then we said our goodbyes, upped anchor, and headed for Paynesville at full speed as we wanted to see if we could join the GLYC "Ancient Mariners' Race" held every Tuesday afternoon. This sounded like it would be just our thing - although we have never raced Meander before, and we had never intended to, but it was such a nice day... Anyway, we arrived at the yacht club at about 1255 and the first start was at 1300, however it is a "stern-chaser" race where the slower boats start first. "Sure, come and join us" was the reaction. Fortunately, there is another Adams Traditional 36 (sister ship to Meander) at the GLYC, although unfortunately she wouldn't be racing. However this means that they already had an appropriate start time worked out for us, 1319. This gave us about 15 minutes to get back to the boat, clear the dock, get fenders and lines stowed, get sails up, assign crew positions, and get to the start line. Oh, and figure out what the course would be. Fortunately, with a stern-chaser there are other boats to follow, at least to start with, so we could do this if we ever found ourselves in the lead...

Well, what then transpired was nothing short of astounding. The wind was very light, only about 5 knots, and we are laden down with cruising gear (we were certainly the only boat in the fleet carrying a liferaft plus a dinghy, plus several hundred litres of water, plus food for 5 for a month, plus more colouring books and pencils than you can poke a stick at...) however it quickly became apparent that the 19 minute head start we gave some boats wasn't nearly enough. We felt like Ikon (a Beneteau First 45) must feel like on a Wednesday night in Hobsons Bay. I was really very surprised. Most of the rest of the fleet (of a dozen boats or so) were trailer-sailers of differing levels of sportiness and so were probably 10 feet shorter than we were, but in the light conditions I thought they'd eat us for breakfast. Not so. By half way up the first long windward leg we had taken the lead and were desperately trying to decipher the somewhat cryptic nick-names given to the marks to figure out where on earth we were supposed to go next.

Fortunately (because we really didn't know where to go after the bottom mark), the upwind leg was followed by an extremely slow downwind leg. Running dead downwind in 5 knots of wind is never going to be fast - especially when it is a race without spinnakers - however even then the lighter trailer sailers didn't catch us appreciably and we rounded the bottom mark with a healthy 2-300m lead. At that point the race was terminated because we had reached the critical time of 1515 at which all boats must head for the yacht club bar. We figured this meant the race was abandoned but, no, we were roundly congratulated on our victory!

A little bit embarrassing as this meant that we also went away with a nice bottle of wine (and a round of soft drinks for the kids) for our efforts. A very, very pleasant afternoon which we will try to repeat on upcoming Tuesdays. The GLYC has made us feel very welcome - something we are very grateful for - but we suspect that in future races we will be starting later than 1319, we may have showed our colours a little too soon!

Leading the fleet back downwind. Note the massive speed and the next boat just above the right hand end of our solar panel - oh yeah, we were definitely the only boat with one of those, not to mention the outboard motor I just spotted too...