I have just been reminded that after dinner, during on-going drinks in one of our apartments at Cote d’Azure following on from race 2 of Performance cruising at Sail Port Stephens 2017, we had a discussion about the incident that took place at the Providence South mark.

I sort of allude to this in  Sail Port Stephens – Performance Cruising, but now incriminating photographs have surfaced! These have been made into video presentation click here or view below.

The scene is the dining table in apartment 27 of Cote d’Azure.
The discussion is held along the lines of a protest hearing incident re-enactment.
The boats are represented by appropriately folded paper napkins.
Where appropriate bow sprits are represented with tooth picks.
Providence South  Mark is a “Crowny”, glasses of wine purely for participant use.
Left to right in the first frame are napkins reperesenting:
1 – Agrovation
2- G-whizz
3 – Mascap
Review committee are the crew of G-whizz, chaired by Danni Birchall the fore deckie.

The facts are simply this:
Agrovation after rounding temporarily left a space between it and the mark, the skipper of G-whizz temporarily though that there was space to sneak into,  the skipper of Mascap surely saw this and though “Oh shit” time to give this fool some room or this will end in tears. After temporarily leaving the space Agrovation permanently closed it, G-whizz steered to starboard to avoid hitting the mark, Mascap decided to also steer to starboard to give G-whizz some more room.

There was some discussion at the time mainly from Danni on the fore deck that went along the lines of “Oh Shit!”, on hearing this Michael Grove on the helm of Agrovation turned to look at the situation and subsequently also exclaimed “Oh shit”. Someone on Mascap gave the sage and accurate advice of “You can’t do that”, the upshot is that the bow sprit of G-whizz missed the stern of Agrovation by inches (or less) the actual measurement will never be accurately known, apart from the fact that it probably was a bit close.

The findings of this re-enactment (Call it a private protest hearing) is that we were lucky that Mascap did not protest us, we surely would have lost that hearing, I am glad that when they passed us to windward on the work back to Yakaaba head, we did not make life too difficult for them. I’m also glad that Michael is still talking to me.

I never did get the opportunity to both apologise to and thank Peter McClelland from Mascap for my mistake and his sensible seamanlike actions.