Etchells Nationals 2009: Bandwagon's good and bad day

12:23 AM Tue 13 Jan 2009 GMT

'Skip Lissiman and the crew on Bandwagon' . ?

The update is coming out a little later than I would like as we have just finished a trip to the protest room. Let me start by saying - if in doubt do the penalty turns - it is not worth the aggravation!

On the water we had a good day

Race 1 finally got away in about 10 -12 knot southerly breeze under the 'Black Flag' after a few general recalls - (3 restarts) and after sorting out a tangle at the start (more on that later) we were in the top three at the top mark with Pedro (Kirwan Robb) leading TRIAD, John Bertrand and us close behind.

At the finish we ended up second behind John Bertrand with Doug Kerr (Screaming Plum) in third and Pedro fourth.

The second race had a little more wind from the SSW at about 12-14knots and lumpy chop being built up by the incoming tide and with a little push up the transom from Gary Smith at the start we had a clean start near the leeward end of the starting line, which was heavily biased.

By the time we got to the top mark we were had slender lead from Mark Bulka (Critical Balance) and stayed that way for the remainder of the race to win comfortably with Mark Bradford (RONI) third and the kiwi team on Valsheda ( Alastair Gair) fourth.

On shore we had a bad day
Once we got ashore we found we had a protest from race one with Pedro for the prestart incident which was a tangle of a group of boats with us a the 'meat in the sandwich'.

By the time the protest jury handed down their decision at 10pm they had disqualified us from Race 1, so I obviously didn't do a good enough job convincing them of the facts as I saw it - or I should had done my 360 degree penalty turn soon after starting and it would have sufficed - needless to say very disappointed - but tomorrow another day.

We still have six races to go.. Plus we can drop our (worst score) DSQ score - so still plenty of opportunities still to go..

The team of Bandwagon would like to thank their sponsors SLAM sports wear, Club Marine boat insurance, Ronstan for their support.

by Skip Lissiman

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Etchells Nationals 2009: Bandwagon's good and bad day

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