2025 | SPRING REGATTA

Regatta Report | Mark Yeadon

When my crew WhatsApped me from the bar to announce that Diva Deux HKG 1193 had come 4th in the Spring Regatta I found it hard to believe. We had had two 'challenging' days on the water, so this made no sense. When I later looked at the results, I found that several boats in Sunday's race, which had definitely sailed past us as we were held in the grip of the vicious ebbing tide (despite our beautifully set spinnaker), were recorded as not finishing. 

I still do not know what exactly these boats did wrong, and I think it best not to open old sores. 

The Spring Regatta was the Spring Regatta - strong tides, wind from unusual directions in bands that were hard to spot, and the usual challenging clutter of big and small boats at turning marks. Let's leave it at that.

Richie Allen at his, hopefully not, last Etchell regatta sailed consistently well to top the table with a first and a second for HKG 1457 followed by Frank Van Kempen on HKG 1364 with equally low scores. No excuses from these teams. Great performances in those conditions.

One of the curious features of the Etchells fleet is its conservatism when it comes to colour choices. We all have white (ish ) hulls (we all know why). The mighty Noddy under Jamie McW bucked the trend for a while with its garish yellow hull. We all have blue sail bags so that, as is the tradition, we can pick up our opponents' sails in error on the pontoon after enjoying the winner's beer.  

But this is now being challenged by 3 boats who had their moments in this regatta. 

Flemmo's new speed machine (HKG 1463) has a very tasteful blue deck so, until they come up with a name to match 'Incoming', it is called "the blue boat'. They had a great first day notching up a well-deserved second. They were disappointingly DNF on day 2. 

The mighty Rookie HKG 787 are always the smartest team with their splendid pink kit. They had a great turn of speed for the oldest boat in the fleet on day 1 notching up a 5th place. Family duties meant they had to skip Sunday.

And last but not least we had the striking Barbie pink kite on the mighty 'Good Thing' HKG 1339 roaring to a well-deserved 3rd overall.