Saturday greeted competitors at the K6 open meeting at Lymington last weekend with sunshine and a rather pleasant Force 2-3 easterly.

The course area for the day was set off Hurst Castle, making for relatively short legs and more importantly a relatively short sail to the race area. Spring tides, compounded by the gradient breeze fighting the sea breeze made for interesting sailing conditions. Key was seeing the breeze and getting to it first.

Three races were completed. Not without incident, race one saw several place changes for the lead; more of a case of grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory. With several buoy rafts and a 3kt tide pushing you onto the windward mark, more than one K6 was unintentionally moored-up here for quite a while. The overall winners of that race were Dave Hitchcock and Ian Nicholson with Jonathan Calascione and Pyers Tucker in second.

In the second race, the left-hand side of the beat was favoured due to less tide inshore. Hitchcock led again, sailing consistently, making less mistakes than most. He was pushed hard in the shifty conditions by Mark Darling/John Ironmonger. Hitchcock crossed the line first by a boat length, only to get DSQ’d for an incident with an RS800. Bill Masterman/Tom Seppings finished 3rd.

Race three was a fairly one sided affair, with a 35degree wind shift before the start made the first beat a ‘one tack’ drag race. Darling led from start to finish, with Hitchcock second, Pete Kirkby/Richard Barker in ‘Pippi’ sniggled a third place.

Sunday dawned even hotter, less wind, but with more chance of sea breeze. However, after several attempts to start, race 4 actually got underway, but was abandoned. Once away the fleet turned itself inside out several times, credit goes to Hitchcock for what only can be termed tactical brilliance, when in doubt go off on a flyer left and win. Patrick Seely followed in 2nd place in extremely demanding conditions.

With the sea breeze fully established in the south-west and blowing a steady Force 3 Darling and Hitchcock within 1 point of each other had a battle on their hands. Calascione/Tucker led at the windward mark, Hitchcock went further left on the run capitalising on the weaker tide in shore and led at mark 4. They stretched their lead taking the gun and the overall regatta.