Back in February, six members of the Women’s Team travelled up to Scotland for the Lass O’ Strath event, which counted for the Women’s Busa 2025 rankings. As winners of last years trophy, the team felt pressure to perform, however with five of the members being freshers, this was a high expectation.
Bardowie Loch brought sunny but cold and windy conditions. Unlike the expanse of Grafham Water, the loch was small and inherently shifty. Saturday morning started off a bit rocky with Esme capsizing at mark 3 (luckily, we changed to cutdown sails after this), Martina chucking herself overboard in a heroic attempt to save the boat from capsizing and Emma backflipping out the boat. All of these being three separate occurrences, showing the team’s love for swimming. The team requested redress for the toe strap snapping and this was unfortunately refused, after it was claimed that falling out of the boat helped us. Having lost a couple of critical races, we closely missed qualifying for gold fleet.
We arrived home to the comfort of the Vella’s house where we had warm showers and were presented with a wonderful spread for dinner. The rest of the evening was spent mastering ceilidhing. Girls were flung and toes were broken.
We went into Sunday’s racing in silver fleet where spirits were high as we won 5/5 races. In the race against Newcastle, we played 1 so hard that the opposition were already on their way home. The last two races of the day provided much excitement as the race outcome was decided on the final beat. For example, the race against Lancaster with Esme a leg and a half behind ended with a big rescue by Emma and Ellen looking on with trepidation from the finish line. Finishing 1st in silver fleet overall, yielded us tunnocks tea cakes as airplane sustenance, in addition to our yummy shortbread made by Andrew. We made it to the airport in time for our flight home, even with Emma running back to retrieve Lisanne’s coat which she left in security. The team slept peacefully on the flight home after the exhaustion of sailing. All in all a super fun weekend and great sailing by everyone.
