Photo of Saturday's coaching, courtesy of Chunkypix.  More photos at http://tinyurl.com/dexoa9

With 2 fantastically sucessful events now under our belt in the RS400 2009 season the rest of the year is looking like a good one.

24 boats made the trip to Pitsford for the 9.30 start on Saturday.  Many new faces, greeted with a nice surprise that if they'd not been to a circuit event before, then attendance at the training weekend gave them free entry to their first event!

Attendees were in for a treat, Sam Parker had arranged a top weekend and assisting him were 2 sailors from the very front of our fleet, chief coach Dave Jones and crewing coach Fiona Clark.

Saturday maximised the weather conditions, a building breeze all day.  The morning was spent focussing on the finer points of efficient tacking, as well as fitting in some short races.  Elephant ears was a fantastic way for each boat to get individual coaching every 2 minutes as they came round for a next go.  Lunchtime brought us a rigging chat and also a very amusing land based crewing drill.  Back on the water some of us learnt that water that cold can make you delirious, others practised downwind techniques and finished the day with short races - the coaching team had great commitment from the sailors - most on the water until gone 5pm!

After sailing we all had a great debrief using the video footage to discuss everyones' techniques and get ideas for Sundays racing.  The club put on fantastic food and I think we'd all be happy if the caterers could come to all events with us!

Sunday was another sunny day with breeze between 10 and 20 kts with some outrageous gusts and some massive bear-aways on the run that were just awesome!  4 short races with close racing across the fleet were held alongside day 2 of the Gul RS500 Winter Champs.  We made the most of the length of the lake and there was some really tight racing.  There was a debrief over lunch as well, as some of our coaches had been on the water taking notes and giving advice.

It really was Howard Farbrother and Nathan Pinch's day, taking first place with three first places.  But Mark Reddington/Colin Staite and Jim/Robyn Rosser chased hard. Nick Simmons and Super Lou Hosken narrowly missed 3rd place on countback with a broken boom in race 4.  Silver fleet was won by  Andrew Hall and Ian Donaldson with Simon Baker and Graham Hayes taking 2nd.

A well known south coast event management going through a few changes at the moment was kind to sponsor the prizes, watch out for them later in the year in a new guise!!