WESTON Bay Yacht Club held a Friday evening bay race last week, watched from the club house on Uphill beach by people enjoying a drink and the spectacular sunset, as always with sailing the weather played an important role.

WESTON Bay Yacht Club held a Friday evening bay race last week, watched from the club house on Uphill beach by people enjoying a drink and the spectacular sunset, as always with sailing the weather played an important role.

There were four boats taking part, Trivial Pursuit, Fleurie, and Spirit of Braganza all class one and Gun Smoke the lone class two boat. The wind was a light south westerly, and the competitors glided slowly into position to cross the start line well grouped.

The course proved to be rather ambitious for the light airs that evening with the wind completely dying at times. The course was from X, a buoy opposite the Sea Life Centre out to the Juicy buoy half way along Brean Down, then to the Churchill buoy in the outer reaches of the middle of the bay, back to X leaving it to port, over to a buoy alongside the Old Pier and finally back to X leaving it to starboard to finish. Two laps for class one boats and one lap for the class two boat.

Trivial Pursuit skimmed around the bay, she draws little which enabled her to take advantage of the lightest of breezes, when the race officer shortened the race due to the lack of wind she was able to finish in good time and took up station in the bay to watch the other boats struggle to sail at all.

Her captain Don Sutherland was race officer and had a long wait to take the finishing times of the rest of the fleet since shortly after Trivial finished the wind died completely and crews in the remaining boats pushed sails out as far as possible to try to catch any available wind, Gun Smoke, as a class 2 boat, finished on the port crossing of X but the other two boats continued around the course with night falling, Fleurie and Braganza took different routes from X to the Old Pier buoy, with Fleurie trying to catch the clockwise current that flows around the bay, however although both boats took different lines they ended up rounding the buoy almost together and headed close hauled to the finish at X.

Fleurie looked as if she was going to cross the line ahead of Braganza but lost all wind not far from the line and turned 360 degrees before finishing allowing Braganza to slip past to finish second behind Trivial Pursuit, Fleurie was third and Gun Smoke first in class 2.

The boats then had to navigate back to the river in the dark and the evening finished with a string of boat navigation lights filing quietly up the river to their moorings.