Our final weekend’s racing of the season and the forecast was good, with a bit of surf, to provide some action.
Friday
The weather was glorious, beautiful clear skies and sunshine, but a keen wind. The surf was about 4-5 feet – it didn’t look much from the beach, but as soon as the practise races started, we could see this was not going to be easy racing.
We had a couple of good heats on Friday, despite the races being restarted several times due to other teams flipping their boats and losing pilots / co-pilots, including the pilot of the No1 boat. Unfortunately, he was pretty badly injured and was out of the racing for the entire weekend. They managed to find a replacement pilot and were able to continue racing in a bid for the Championship.
The third heat was going well, when on one of the corners, we were caught out by one of the waves and were flipped over.
We were both rescued by the safety crew and taken to the beach, but we were concerned for the boat, as we needed to get it flipped back over as quickly as possibly, which in the end it did on its own, but seemed to be drifting towards Newquay.
We were supposed to be racing in the next division one heat, which only gave us one heat in which to get the engine wiped dry and running again. Unfortunately, we did not manage this, though we got the engine running quite quickly, so we were disqualified from 2 heats and put in doubt whether we would make it to the final. Our only hope, was that a lot of other teams had been put out of racing completely by their boats flipping. We did well in the final heat and fortunately managed to get into the final and succeeded in getting 4th place after starting in 8th position.
Saturday
Again, the weather was glorious and the surf was possibly a little higher, but the sets seemed to be more organised than Friday.
After spending some considerable time last night cleaning the engine out, we were keen to get out on the practise lap, to see if it was running as good as before. Everything was going well.
We stayed upright in all our heats, although Chris did come out on one heat. We gained some good positions in the heats and the boat had been performing well. We even managed a win in one of the heats.
We were successful in getting through to the final and had a starting position of 3rd place. Unfortunately, the start was straight into a set of big waves and we fell back to 4th place, behind the top 3 teams. We managed to stay in 4th throughout the race and finished in 4th place.
We were pleased with our results for the weekend, although it would have been nice to get a medal.
Despite a few problems at the start of the season and being relegated to Division 2 for a few races, which limited our points at the start, we finished the season in 7th place, out of 35 teams who entered the Championship.
