Go Racing: Laser

By Clive Quantrill – March 2019

Looking back at a great 2018 season we had excellent support for fleet racing: the Wednesday evening Laser class start attracted more than 10 boats most weeks, and for several weeks we managed over 20 Lasers on the start line. The Saturday race series remained highly competitive with six different series winners in 2018: Cameron Harris (twice), Mike Hanes, Chris Spark, Doug Hutton-Squire (twice), Dan Scurrell and Diana Pipe. The age group winners for the year with the best results across four series were: Dan Scurrrell (Apprentice, 35-44), Doug Hutton-Squire (Master, 45-54), Peter Mills (Grand Master, 55-64), John Hughes (Great Grand Master, 65+). Congratulations to all. We also nearly had a first when a Laser almost won a trophy race! Harry Ogden was catching the winning boat approaching the line, finishing second in the Trafalgar pursuit race – no reason a Laser can’t go one further this year.

For 2019 we are looking forward to having 50 Lasers at the Club. We’ve got a great team in place to support Laser racing this year including Toby Tracey managing the club hire boats (book at https://waldringfieldsc.com/club-boats/), John Hughes posting results and Patrick Cooney running this year’s Open meeting. Our aim remains to provide competitive fleet racing and be inclusive of a wide range of sailor abilities. We have some of the best sailors at the club pushing at the front of the fleet and a variety of races-within-races all the way through the fleet. We’ll continue to run ‘all-in’ series results where racers can use either the full-size standard sails or Radials depending upon the weather conditions with both counting in the overall series results, and we will also breakout Radial results. This helps equalize the weight and age range across the broadest range of conditions possible to maximize sailing time for everyone.

We have two club Lasers for hire so people can literally try before they buy and see if the Laser is the boat for them, be it for a quick Wednesday evening race and/or Saturday racing. Both the club hire boats were re-rigged last year and had new sails, both standard and radials. So why not come and a give a Laser a go when you have a spare couple of hours!  Hope to see you all on the water in 2019.