Here’s wishing all members a happy and safe festive season.

Good luck to those attending the P & Starling Nationals- other members, if you are around why not go out and support our junior sailors taking part. Our OK sailors will be in Napier for the Nationals and Worlds from Jan 5 whilst a little closer to home the Sunburst Nth Island Regatta is at Kapiti on Anniversary weekend. I know of at least 2 Sunburst crews who are just itching to have a go at the round Toko Is. race record during this contest!

Also from January 21 the skiffs/R Class, with our very own Steve Hogg and Shaun Sheldrake, will be performing for your entertainment off Pt Jerningham. From Jan 25 the contest rolls in to the inter-dominions and this is one event where we regularly clean up the Aussies! The contest has been designed for good spectator viewing of these fast and colourful boats so don’t miss it.

Congratulations to Tom Taylor who is the Wellington representative in the Tanner Cup, which precedes the P Class Nationals; and also to Aaron Hume-Merry who finished runner-up at the selection trials.

Great to see Andrew Phillip’s smiling face in the Evening Post of November 13 as the winner of a College Sport Wellington Award for yachting. Andrew along with Matt Hibbard and Nick Lantz make up the Worser Bay team for the Royal NZ Yacht Squadron training week at Kawau Island Dec 8 – 14.

Talking of, teams here’s hoping that a Worser Bay team comes out of the hat to compete in the Team New Zealand Etchells Regatta – and that Dean Barker is asking for names and addresses afterwards!

And finally, the really exciting bit, we are expecting Santa a little earlier this year with the first two of our brand new, and fabulous, club sunbursts arriving December 20^th – the remaining 3 in the New Year.

Last month we talked about how handicaps are progressively adjusted each race – by how much? Well at present we are limiting the adjustment each race to 2% i.e. if you are on 0.900 and do extremely well on adjusted time, next race your handicap would be 0.918 or if you did badly you would go to 0.882. In a race where your adjusted time was 100 minutes you would need to be at least 2 minutes better or worse than the median boat for the maximum handicap adjustment for the next race to apply.

This handicapping system has of course nothing to do with the Sunburst ladder race, or the Harbour Race, which are called Mark Foy races – presumably Mrs Foy and her son Mark feel deeply honoured by this.

In a Mark Foy, boats start at 1min intervals with the slowest starting first, hopefully on time if they want to win, and with the start line basically to themselves. Without the gurus in front of them, when it comes to figuring out the best way to go, they really have to nut it out for themselves. All good experience and applying the philosophy of one of the early starters of "lets go like hell; they may never catch us" can pay dividends.

Due to different circumstances that exist between a Mark Foy and a normal race, handicap patterns tend to differ. Even the handicapper at WBBC is a different person! Working in 1 minute intervals means that in a 60 min race + or – 1 minute is a 1.66% adjustment. The minimum adjustment possible under a Mark Foy is therefore almost the maximum allowed for in the handicaps for Series races and for this reason changes in Mark Foy handicaps tend to be less frequent.

Calendar:

 Dec 15 Harbour Race – Note earlier starting time of 12.30pm for Sunbursts off 15mins.

Dec 22 Resail Senior Series 2 Race 3

Jan 26 Club Picnic – all members. See details elsewhere.

Feb 6 Family Day - ladies race

- crews race

• parents race in Optimists
• etc etc
• crews race