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140th Anniversary Dinghy Regatta

Published 18:25 on 29 May 2023

Coombe Cellars hosted a 3 day event over the late bank holiday weekend in celebration of Teign Corinthian YC being formed in May of 1883. To encourage as wide a participation as possible we arranged the first day to be a treasure hunt around the gloriously scenic River Teign. This was followed by 2 days of competitive racing - an all-in handicap race on day 2 and a pursuit race on the third day. Weather conditions on each of the three days was about as perfect as you can get with blue sky and sunshine throughout. Not only that an easterly breeze each day was reinforced by the sea breeze making for some glorious sailing.

Fourteen took part in the fun Treasure Hunt on Saturday 27th May - some cadets, some families and a couple of husband and wife teams. Four different clues had been laid around the river, two upstream of Coombe Cellars and two downstream. The clues were a mixture of letters and emojis written on white cylinders tethered to mooring buoys. Find and interpret each clue then unscramble the order and come back with the magic phrase. Everyone found the clues: an eye, heart and letters CC and YT and successfully came back with the I love TCYC phrase. Congratulations to all especially the first three teams to hand in the correct phrase who were rewarded with small trophies:

Tom and Sammy Porter
The Dunbar family
Elanor, Anna and Richard Hattersley

Sunday 28th was as equally pleasant as the day before and a slightly different group of participants turned up for the all-in handicap racing. With a few novice sailors in our midst Race Officer, James Stevenson, was keen to carefully explain the course at the briefing in front of our clubhouse

With two races scheduled some were overly keen to get launched and not only capsized on the slipway but also shortly after launching

How can our treasurer treat his wife like that??

Bank holiday Monday, 29th May, provided yet another glorious day for the third day of racing. This time a 100 minute pursuit race. Some different faces turned up for this last day and a challenging sail ensued with lots of white caps breaching the river surface. The overall position was to be decided between John Ewbank in his Solo and husband and wife team of Sasha and Carlie Karakusevic. However it was Brian Tucker in his ILCA/Laser 4.7 that was first away in the freshest breeze of the afternoon. Brian made the most of this and got clean away from the chasing Solos, Laser 2000 and K1. Everyone struggled with the weed in the river and Gary Molton was unfortunate enough to capsize at the leeward mark with his rudder coming adrift as well. With a particularly low High Water it was far from ideal for Mike Commander's in his keeled K1 and after bottoming out several times, dredging weed from the river bed and sailing backwards several times (to dislodge the weed) he retired after being told hed sailed the wrong course anyway!

After totting up all the scores the final results for the weekend were