Revelry’s Scottish Series

Murray Caldwell, new owner of Revelry (ex-Apollo) writes from Scotland: ‘The Scottish series is always the first break away from work for me in a few months and nearly always my first proper sail of the season. This year was no different except it was going to be “Revelry’s” first regatta as well!

We had spent all winter installing our new (to us) Yanmar and had run out of time for anything else before our launch date, so the boat got a quick coat of £19.99 “Flag” Antifouling then in it went, so we could spend the next month getting everything sorted in plenty of time for Scottish.

Well that never happened, work got frantic and the boat just laid at the mooring until the Thursday lunchtime, when we headed to Tarbert.

I left the mooring, then “George” (autopilot) was fired up and I got about doing all the wee jobs that should have been done over the winter, this was made even better by a dolphin playing around the boat for a good 30 mins, it kept going under the boat and rolling about on its side, it was quite amazing and not something I had experienced before. The only downside was at reasonable revs the Speedo was only reading 4.7 Knots but a quick shout to friend alongside in his Sigma revelled that it was more like 6.5!! The extra spent on the prop was worth it!!

So Boat was ready (ish) only thing left to do was test the new cooker. It was bliss motoring up loch fyne on my new boat with dinner and a glass of wine!

Racing starts on the Friday with a coastal Race. Bambi lead from the first mark and was not seen again while mercenary and us tussled all day but in the end we got no hoot as we were OCS. The Saturday was 2 windward leeward type courses in a good fresh wind, we had a bad start but at lease we were on the right side of the line!, We were surprised when we were 2nd impala at the top mark as no clutch was holding, winches not working etc but this was short lived when the leeward mark came and no one seemed to want to take the kite down. To save embarrassment I had better say no more… Bambi was 1st again to Mercenary.

The second race of the day was better for us we got a good start and were just behind Mercenary at the weather mark, that’s the way it stayed for the rest of the race but finally an Impala won on CYCA!!

Sunday brought more wind for the “round inch race” which was good fun apart from a few close calls on the start line luckily we survived but can’t comment to much as we were quite far behind!!

We enjoyed our weekend a lot but now have a very long list of jobs to do including lift out and re Antifoul (Should have spent more!) in time for our next outing that is west highland week.