After 4 weeks of lockdown, BSC sailors came together on line to take part in a virtual spring regatta. We had 12 sailors competing in J70 Sports Boats to determine who would represent the club at the RYA e Sailing Spring Championships.

The regatta was held over two days with 6 races on each day with a total of 4 discards to help compensate for the inevitable broadband issues of virtual sailors living out in the wastelands of the three H’s  (Heybridge, Hackney and Hatfield Peverel).

The Virtual Bridge was open 10 minutes before the first race with the Race Officer and his glamorous assistant maintaining social distancing rules by being in the study and the kitchen respectively. With a minute to go to the first start we had a 6 racers on the start line, after 10 minutes of tight racing Nick Evans emerged as the winner, unfortunately that was it for the Evans family as their dial up internet connection was not upto the job.

Race 2 started with the Andrew’s family joining in, we also had  two of our more mature sailors taking part giving us a total of 10 racers on the start line. This time Charlie Dixon emerged victorious after a tight tussle with Hugh Andrews, this was to set the scene for the rest of the race series. Jess Haigh and Graham Hoy lead the following pack with some very consistent results, although Graham’s performance did drop off when he ran out of VMG tokens. Special mentions should go to Izzy Wallace who had a good series and managed to record a bullet in the penultimate race and also to RGA294 a surprise entrant from Spain who somehow managed to hack in to our last race, covered Charlie Dixon for most of the race and manage to sneak a win only to be disqualified by the race officer.

Congratulations to Charlie Dixon who was our overall series winner and will go onto represent the club at the RYA Eastern Region Virtual Racing Championship, on the 18^th of May, and hopefully qualify for the National Finals. We have also made the decision to award Charlie the Cadet Frostbite Trophy this year which hopefully we will be able to present to him in person later in the year, in the meantime here is a virtual version.