Hewson Regatta on Spellbound

 The Hewson Regatta is held every year, named after a family that helped found the yacht club and start racing in Port Dover. We had a good turnout of boats and some fabulous racing weather. Rick, his daughter, Jen, and I sailed Spellbound in the Jib and Main (JaM) class.

Saturday was a race around Long Point Bay and was quite windy. Rick vacillated on which head sail to put up but in the end we were glad he chose the smaller one, as even that was sometimes difficult to control

Redhead overtaking us as she was in the Spinnaker fleet.

Islay in hot pursuit

and she managed to overtake us on the second leg. We ended up finishing just behind her but beat her in the standings due to the handicap system.

"The Witch" passing us.

We took turns helming (5 hours on the water is too long to stay as focused as you need to be to helm)

while the other 2 spent time trimming sails, commenting on other competitors progress and, of course, taking pictures.

I got to test out the drink holder that I had picked up at the Sailing School Garage Sale.

The wind built during the course of the day

and the last leg was a wild ride.

After tidying up the boat we went to the Yacht Club for a meal, drinks and a live band. We were wind blown, sun burnt but invigorated. Even more so when we learned that we had come first in our fleet of 6.

Sunday was totally different. There was little wind when we first motored out and Rick had no trouble deciding to use the biggest head sail. 

We started racing at 10am, just around the race marks in the Bay, that we race around every Wednesday night.

As soon as one race ended the next would start. Very little time between to recover, snack, strategize, take pictures.....

We got 3 races in before the event ended at 2pm.

There was a lot of close racing. We are pretty evenly matched with Nexus and Islay and jockeyed with them frequently, but sometimes we were racing beside, and doing well against, much bigger boats. According to the handicapping system, Spellbound is the slowest boat in the fleet, but she was consistently proving that wrong. We haven't seen the results for Sunday yet as there were various protests between boats that need to be heard, and judged, by the protest committee, before they will be posted, but we think we won all 3 races on Sunday.