Tim,

This report doubles up in line with this thread regarding giving Mossies added exposure and also is a report as a leadup to the 2009 Mozzie St Leonards state titles.

Matt Stone and myself trailered our Mozzies across the Mornington Peninsula this morning as a shakedown for the trailers and a shakedown for the upcoming titles. Thankfully everything worked well and we arrived safely at Simon Clavin's Mozzie base; McCrae Y.C. around 11:00 am.

We used McCrae Y.C. as the rigging and launching point as we felt it would be less conjested than Safety Beach and we felt that the sail across to Safety Beach would be a great exercise. The green lawns at McCrae Y.C. are just fantastic to rig up on and the wide rubber mats all the way to the water make life so very easy.

Simon, Matt and myself launched our Mozzies from Simon's base club just after midday and had a run/broad reach to Safety Beach Y.C. We arrived on the beach at 1:10 pm, were welcomed by the one of the Safey Beach Mozzie sailors Paul Martin who gave an impromptu briefing on the sand. Alas the other Safety Beach Mozzie didn't sail since his international flight arrival didn't give him enough time to get to the yacht club.

We signed on and followed the rest of the fleet out to the start line for a 1:30 start.

2 triangular short course races were conducted with a 10 - 20 knot SW SSW wind which was roughly parallel to the beach. We were 2nd fleet in the start sequence with an A class fleet first away. Our fleet consisted of 3 Cat rigged Mozzies, Matt Stone's Mozzie with spinnaker and 3 Hobie 17's. Glenn Ashby was racing his A class cat and naturally had a clean sweep of both races.

The racing was a very interesting with lots of wind swings due to the shelter provided by Athur's Seat. Matt used his spinnaker to great advantage and cleared away in both races.

I had a great tussle with the 3 Hobie 17's and Paul and Simon were not far behind. Paul had a bridle mounting failure in race 1 and was lucky to make it safely back to the Yacht club beach without dis-masting. Simon had trouble with his rudders in the 2nd race was forced to retire with the finish line just beyond his reach.

After the conclusion of racing we sailed back to the beach, signed off, had a brief discussion with Paul who said he would come over to Somers for some racing soon then Matt and I swapped Mozzies for the windward leg back to McCrae checking out our own and each others rigs and giving some pointers to Simon on his sail setup.

Ariving back at McCrae at 5:20 pm after 5 hours on the water we discussed the afternoon which we all thought was a great success.

Regards,

Peter

p.s. Simon didn't need any sail set-up pointers since he will be using his brand new Ashby sail with brand new yet to be received fibre foam battens at the state titles next weekend.