Endeavour Trophy

After finishing the AOA offshore race I grabbed a couple of hours sleep and headed off to the endeavour trophy up in Essex at Burnham on crouch. Last year I sailed with Ben Saxton representing the RS200 class and won.

This year I teamed up with Nick Craig who I have been sailing with earlier in the year in the Merlin Rocket class. We won an incredibly tough nationals and got invited to compete in the prestigious Endeavour trophy again.

The event is held in Topper Xenon’s- Kindly supplied by Topper for the event. This is a class that is not sailed competitively in the UK and has been the boat used for the Endeavour for the past few years the idea been that the playing field is pretty even as everyone is in a fairly unknown boat that is not too tricky to sail.

We arrived Friday morning to rig an prepare the boats for the event with a coaching session planned we ventured out in what appeared to be light airs for some starting practice and short coarse racing. The wind quickly built to gusting 30 and the fleet was sent in (in order to preserve the boats for the coming days racing).

After sailing we tucked in to the food provided by the club having second and 3rd helpings!!

Over the week end racing we had a wide range of conditions from light (sub 5 knts) to fairly windy (20 knts) and various combinations of tide against and with us up wind. This made form some tricky starts.

The racing was awesome with some many top sailors on the start line. We had some great racing Nick and I working really well together in the boat & around the race course and managed to get 7 bullets out of the 8 races in the series to discard the 2nd from the first race! The racing was by no means easy as we had some pretty tight battles with the Laser 2000 and fireball boys as well as the rest of the fleet!

All in all a great event, Supper happy with the result!… now time to get back to the offshore sailing … solo this time!