The NSSA Team Racing Championships took place at Bury Lake on the weekend of 4th and 5th October.

Cambridgeshire were represented by two teams of 3:

Team 1 Jonny Leeding Rosie Bain Mara Jonson

Team 2 Emma Houlder Martin Mills Lucia Lachlan-Cope

The competition was initially a round robin of up to 10 races using the Swiss League format used in the Wilson Trophy ( http://www.wksc.net/wilsontrophy/ ) followed by semi finals and a final. This is a particularly good format where as the competition progresses the teams are paired against teams of a similar standard by using previous results, after a random draw in the first round.


With only Rosie having competed in an NSSA team racing event before the weekend was always going to be a steep learning curve for both teams. The first round draw did them no favours as they were both drawn against good teams and not surprisingly neither team got off to a winning start in light but increasing winds.

With lessons learned from the first round the teams were noticably better in the subsequent rounds, in particular Team 1 who were to lose only one more race that day. As the day progressed the wind increased, so much so that the organisers were forced to call all of the boats in to be reefed. Even with a double reef there were still many capsizes, including the most spectacular capsize of the day by Martin who managed to get his boat tangled with Emmas boat and was left stranded in the middle of the lake as both boats sailed away!

The first day ended with each team having completed 6 races, Team 1 in 7th place and Team 2 just below half way.

After an excellent meal at the hotel we joined the rest of the teams for ten pin bowling, which Martin won with a very impressive 4 consecutive strikes from his last 4 bowls!!

It was an early start the next morning with the first race at 9am. In decreasing winds Team 1 won the first two races and when the wind disappeared completely at the start of round 9 they had climbed to 4th place.

With the rain falling and no wind it looked at one point as though the remaining races would be cancelled but 5 minutes before the race officer was planning to abandon, the wind suddenly reappeared... capsizing most of the moored Toppers!


So with round 9 now continuing, Team 1 had to win one more race to be sure of a place in the semi final, unfortunately it was against the excellent Oxford A team, the only team to have won every race so far. Despite giving them more of a test than any other team they lost out by only 2 points. There was then a nervous wait until the rest of the results were in but in the end they lost out on a tie break to Kent for a place in the semi final.

The competition was not surprisingly won by Oxford who won maintained their unbeaten record.

Next year the event is being hosted by Northamptonshire, hopefully we'll be able to take more teams and maybe go one better and come back with the trophy!

Finally, a big thank you to Dave Plowman who organised a training session in September. It was encouraging to see many of the tactics he taught being put into practice and the improvement of both teams throughout the weekend was very noticable.

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