You find a small flooded gravel pit in Bedfordshire, assemble a team of slightly unhinged people from across the nation, one of whom owns a yellow Kestrel. Then you use these two commodities to lap said gravel pit for 24 hours until someone fires skyward the most advanced British rocket propelled projectile since the top gear space shuttle.
Without doubt this is a damn stupid idea, and we all knew this before taking part. But when offered the opportunity we all adopted the mountaineering lemming like philosophy of saying yes because it was there.
The weekend began for me, as so many do, by getting lost. I drove through a medium sized Mersyside based football team as expected and arrived at Potton. Unfortunately I completely missed Gareth's road and found myself with escape velocity on the dark side of Potton. I braked and assumed a geo-stationary orbit in a lay-by just outside the town while re-orienting the orbiter for re-entry. After I raised Gareth on the ship to shore he calculated where my bounce off the atmosphere and return to the void had come. I was then expertly directed back in by mission control. Splash down was successfully completed a few minutes later when I was shown my new favorite fridge in the Bedfordshire area, and I was quickly exported to relaxation. Only minutes after my arrival came the arrivals of: Toby, Dawn, Mark and Nicky.
After a little bit of drinking, chatting and a little granny grand prix we were taken for the first time (for some of us at least.) so see the arena for our forth coming bout of lunacy. Well we were actually there to pitch the DJ booth but the effect of our presence was two fold. In between bungeeing the tent together and watching Mark quite expertly use several tent pegs to convincingly destroy several persuading wands we were able to take in the size, or rather lack thereof, of the barely football pitch sized lake we were presented with. Still, we were all up for a challenge, and the prime motivating factor was having a laugh, so why not.
After pitching the marquee we adjourned to Gareth's place for a Chinese meal and some more exporting. A fine time was had by me, and I heard no complaints from anyone else either. Though I was too sloshed to notice if there had been any.
The next day dawned an unreasonable time before dawn has any right to dawn. (make sense of that if you can.) But I rose, wiped the sleep out of my eyes, but the shaving razor had been left at home so I cannot accurately attest to it's temperature, I was saved the stinging though. Any who, after we had dispatched Nicky to go and make a full frontal assault on her liver in the interests of sending someone into married life Toby, Dawn and Mark slaved over a hot bacon fryer while Gareth and I started throwing DJ equipment at the back of various cars. When the cars and the humans had both eaten our various cargo's we made our way to the lake.
On our way to the lake we made a stop at the local Tescos to fill up with energy drink and printer ink. Though instead of printer ink Gareth bought himself a new printer, due to lack of ink in shop. I then bought said printer off him as it seemed a shame to only use it for one weekend and I needed a printer, and this was suitably cheap, hooray.
So after a little light boat adjusting in front of a slightly bemused owner (Sorry about that, FD sailors have that effect on most people) we, or rather Toby and Richard set the race in motion by taking the first hour stint.
It's difficult to say how the race was going as once the first 10 or 15 laps have been sailed, and there have been a few incidents (like Enterbox masts falling down) it is difficult to tell where everyone is. Especially as every team was in something different and as such all the average lap times were going to be different.
The wind for the most part was light and the sailing was therefore challenging, at one point my designated helm (Strangler) made the comment "The winds not shifting, it's vibrating!!" this was a unbelievably accurate statement as the breeze could only really be counted on to be heading where a lift was required and lifting you in to the island when you needed an excuse to tack. Luckily for us it was sometime beyond midnight when Strang and I made an unexpected and gravelly landfall. Luckily we weren't the first nor last to make this error, and we performed our grounding at one of the darkest points of the night, so no harm to reputations was done.
The event, though a race was a fun event first and foremost, and while we were all striving to have fun, some I feel took the relaxed nature a little too far by actually giving the boat a nice warm hug.
Aaaaaahhh.
(Well that's lined me up for a slap sooner rather than later.)
The obvious effect of a 24 hour race is a certain amount of inevitable sleep deprivation and day slip. Finding things to do while not on shift either sailing or doing a duty is always an issue. DJ booth ker-plunk was favourite for a while, but this would have been a bit unkind. So I resisted the temptation.
At about 5 or 6 in the morning on Sunday morning Toby and I spent quite a while discussing the prospect of cracking open a beer. The requisite day slip necessary had occurred and so we both felt that we could quite fancy one. However we managed to resist the almost overwhelming temptation.
The only real water based dramas for me were the sudden exit of the rudder while we were going up wind and a couple of rescues while I was on safety boat duty. The exit of the rudder did cause a moment or two of worry, but luckily my rudderless sailing was just good enough to hold station while strang re-hung the rudder. While on safety boat we had to go and help a comet which had suffered quite a spectacular death roll on the dark side of the right hand island, and a recovery of a pacer who's tiller had broken.
Come the end of the race all our efforts had pulled us into 2nd place behind a team of solo sailors. Not a bad result really, the solo was definitely the best boat to be using and the guys sailing it were well in control of every situation and very slick in their handling, changeovers in particular.
Even as the final countdown was being played and the boats were crossing the finish line the reprobates were discussing the next years event, selecting the weapon of choice and even suggesting where we might procure one from. First on the list is an Albacore and names of mugs who might lend us one were taken. I for one would sign up to do next years event today, one of the best sailing and social events I have been to for a long while.
Thanks must go to Gareth for suggesting the event, organising the team, procuring a boat and putting us up in his house for the nights on either end of the weekend. Also for seemingly arranging every other facet of the event as a whole, being the DJ, PRO and results master and at several points in the wee small hours, galley slave. I hope those 15 minutes of sleep you got were good.
Any who, good effort and well done to everyone who took part, hope to see you all next time.
Next event for us is the FD worlds in the Netherlands, boat is already on the double stacker and the point of no return has been passed. Lets just hope my new plaque arrives from ISAF and I find my membership card and certificate before it's time to leave. Binge Drinking and casual violence goes international goes international for the first time ever at the end of this month.
BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID.
