Some weeks ago when the Seal Point Yacht Club entry was filed, a press release stated the following in the opening two paragraphs: “There is a feeling amongst top sailors who have lifted the Lipton Challenge Cup in victory that unless one has started preparing for a Lipton Challenge early, all effort may be wasted!
“At this early stage, a team from Seal Point Yacht Club (SPYC) on the Vaal Dam, appears to have a head start and have been beavering away with their sights set high.”
Well those words are pretty darn true as, so far, the SPYC guys sailing ‘PhatAss’, a FarEast 28R, are tied on points for first place with both the Royal Cape YC (RCYC) and Stilbaai YC (SYC) on their Pacer 27.
As a result of the above, today’s (Thursday’s) races were highly critical to see who got a jump on the fleet and lead going into the final two critical days.
The first race started at 11h21 in a south/south westerly breeze of 12 knots. Sailing the triangular course RCYC (Cape 31) showed their mettle by winning the start by several boat-lengths as their spinnaker, in the downwind start, filled first and almost on the line! In the middle of the start line there was some gnashing of teeth and shouts of “weather boat” heard!
RCYC showed the fleet a very clean transom and lead at the first mark, finally completing the first round in about 47 minutes. They were followed 8-minutes later by SPYC with SYC a further 2-minutes behind. Buffalo River Yacht Club (BRYC) brought up the rear 27-minutes later.
The RCYC team extended their lead on the second triangle and took the gun approximately 15 minutes ahead of SPYC. The rest of the fleet followed as below: SYC; PYC; RNYC & BRYC.
One must not forget that racing is on a handicap basis as the fleet is not one-design where the order across the finish line is the actual result. In handicap racing one has to extrapolate actual results from the elapsed times and handicap of each boat.
So the actual provisional results for race 3 are:
1 RCYC
2 SPYC
3 SYC
4 PYC
5 RNYC
6 GLYC
7 BRYC
Race 4 (second race of day 3).
The fourth race of the series was underway at 14h10 on a 1.6nm Windward – Leeward course with a downwind start. The race followed a similar pattern to the 3rd one, with RCYC again taking line honours followed by SPYC.
And again the RCYC team had the best start at the committee boat end, although SYC at the pin end were pretty slick with their start. It does appear that the pin end was not favoured as RCYC rounded the top mark some five minutes ahead of SPYC with SYC way down in 5th spot.
The provisional handicap results showed that RCYC also took the honours for the second time in the day, thus elevating the Royal Cape Yacht Club to the top of the leader board and the sole leaders overall of the Challenge. They were followed in race 4 by SPYC while the PYC team scored a 3rd.
Tomorrow (Friday) and Saturday see more racing, so stay tuned to see who will eventually lift the Lipton Cup in victory at prize-giving on Saturday evening.
Overall Provisional Results after 4 Races:
1 RCYC 7 points
2 SPYC 9
3 SYC 13
4 PYC 14
5 GLYC 20
6 RNYC 21
7 BRYC 28
