2010 Qld Contender State Championships
Day 2 Qld Contender State Championship
RQYS November 2009-11-30
Matt Mulder – is he on the longest winning streak?
Matt came, he saw, he conquered. That pretty much sums up the 2 day regatta of this year’s Qld Contender State Championships. Held as part of the Sail Brisbane regatta, the Toll – National Pacific supported Qld fleet lined up with the most boats we had seen for a long while. 15 entered but with one skipper knocked down with a vomiting bug, 14 lined up for the first of four races on Saturday. We were fortunate to welcome Crazy McLean and Scott McInereney from FNQ for the regatta as well as our World Champion candidates for Master and Youth, Jan Mulder and James Dahl respectfully. Steven Grimes and Rod Hieatt chose this regatta to come out of Contender retirement and to give us all a hurry up. Many of the competitors were sporting brand new sails (Matt and Phill included with the black Norths).
What the hell is going on here??? GET OUT OF THE WAY!!!
To the sailing.
Saturday was a pretty warm NNW’ly forecast to get to 25 knots. We saw a fair bit of variability from just trapping to fully powered and starting to dump.
Race one saw Matt get a bit of a jump on the fleet to lead from the start and head out to the left hand side. Geoff Fisher followed him around the top mark in his new Bonezzi closely followed by Steven Grimes, Phill Evans, Andrew Griffiths and the rest of the fleet in a close pack. Matty and his new sail promptly did a horizon job while Geoff, Grimesy, Phill and Andy all bunched up. Up the second beat and Geoff fluffed a tack to “kind-of-capsize” gifting a break to Grimesy. Unfortunately for Steven, his tiller extension pulled out of the tiller leading to a capsize. Geoff was able to sail into 2nd closely followed by Andrew who came through Phill. Steven was able to limp across the line without an extension while he was being mowed down by the ever fast on a run Scott Bowman. Next through was rapidly improving Roger who had been having a great tussle with James Dahl. Just over their shoulder was Rod and Steve Toms who both sailed a great race – the first for a while for Rod who missed the start and a satisfying finish for Steve who is very new to the class. Unfortunately, Crazy in his early pre-racing enthusiasm suffered a bit of breakage and so missed the start due to returning to the beach for repairs. Similarly, Scott broke a halyard and spent some time on the side while lashing up the sail. Jan and Ian Bowman were delayed and just missed the start.
