The day started with slightly overcast weather, with average-sized 3.5 foot swells rolling in. We had a short practice to make sure that the boat was running well, and to get us used to the surf conditions – but not too long to tire us out for the day!
As the tide went out, the swells increased to 5 foot by the end of the day, making for a difficult first leg of the King of the Surf competition.
In the heats, we managed to obtain a first position, two seconds, a third and a fourth place, putting us second on the grid for the final. After a slow start, where Chris wasn’t actually touching the floor on the difficult beach starts, we found ourselves in third place, fighting with our team mates Delta Jets for the rest of the race. We eventually crossed the line in third place, obtaining a bronze medal.
Sunday
Sunday’s surf started similarly to Saturday, but with a scorching sun shining down on us. The waves grew slightly quicker, however, so more of the races were spent in the 5 foot waves.
We decided to conserve our energy and miss out on practice, and this resulted in us obtaining two seconds, a third and a sixth. In the last heat, however, we were disqualified for apparently running over a marker buoy. If it wasn’t for the flag being wrapped around the propeller guard, we might have got away with it! This left it uncertain as to whether we would make it into the final or not.
We squeezed into 8th out of 9 boats for the final, lucky that other boats had made mistakes in the qualifiers too and we had good results to back us up.
We started the final and managed to get around some of the other racers going into the first buoy. We were up into 4th, when the boat in front made a mistake and we were side by side going along the beach front. However, we got nudged going into the first corner, and ended up facing the wrong way on track, slipping down the grid. Luckily, another boat flipped resulting in a restart to the final.
On the restart, we only had two laps remaining to make up the positions again. We finally went across the line in 4th, just missing out on 3rd place by a boat length.
We managed to achieve second place for the entire weekend, putting us in a good position for both the main championship and the King of the Surf championships.
'Team Lost Buoys'
Delta Jets finished just behind us on both days, resulting in a good stack of points towards the team championship.
Championships
At this current moment in time (after 4 days of racing) we are sitting in third in the championship, 5 points behind second.
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