Crosshaven, Ireland
A great week but with a tragedy at the end. Robert Lamb was joined by Martin Stephens and Peter Stuckey. The numbers in Cork were significantly down this year to only 115 boats.
The organisers, led by Anthony O'leary, did well to maintain the great format of Cork Week. The standard format is to run 5 separate courses with any one fleet doing the rounds to a difeerent course area each day. In 2012 the entire entry was split into just two fleets (with 3 classes in each) which visited each course area twice, to have a differnt course configutration on each visit. On the last day all boats then raced in the Harbour race and this was quite a spectacle. It also meant that we coukd leave the Harbour Race to the other team whilst we made our way home on Friday.
So we ran a Trapezoid on our first two days and a Slalom course (a trapezoid but with a forced jybe on the outer loop) on the second two days. We had the big boys on Monday and Wednesday and the smaller boats and white sail classes on Tuesday and Thursday.
In view of the reduced numbers we offered not to come to the organisers but were told in no uncertain terms that we had to run racing as they wanted the quality of race management to be as high as possible.
It was a good week in terms of wind and weather apart from Thursday when the sea was very big. The forecast that day was for the wnd to be 20 knots plus but gradually decreasing over a period of a few hours. The first race was started in about 24 knots of wind and everything looked right for our target time of 75 minutes. But the wind speed dropped after about an hour. And dropped and dropped. Within about 20 minutes it dropped from 24 knots to 5! Inevitably this gave a huge advantage to the bigger boats who were finishing in 10+ knots whilst the smaller boats still had quite a distance to go. There was nothong we could do since some boats finished when the wind was still very sailable; our hands were tied. This resulted in the only unfair race we had amanaged all week and we were not too pleased about it. C'est la vie.
But this was not the tragedy. The tragedy, or rather disaster, was that Martin Stephens, after racing on this last day, fell off a wave in the big sea and broke his ankle. That meant that he would not be able to be a mark layer at the Olympics in Weymouth. A disaster for both Martin and the team!
