The Hyland Challenge Trophy, sponsored by Tara Court, was held over the weekend of the 15th and 16th of February at the Royal Varuna Yacht Club. The conditions on Saturday were excellent, providing a variety of wind strengths for the competitors.
In the monohull fleet it was Neil Dunkley who took the first race taking a slight advantage of the stronger wind out to sea. With the wind strengthening, Peter Young used his excellent upwind speed to take the second monohull race with Gareth Owen just unable to close the gap. In the third race of the day, the wind picked up yet again under the cloud that was building. This also led to a big shift to the left just before the start. Gareth picked up on this quickly and scored his first win of the weekend.
First honours in the multihulls went to Jan in his Nacra 16 square who was within touching distance of the faster F18’s ahead at the finish, and easily won when the handicaps were calculated. As conditions changed as the day went on, it was then the turn of Axel to take the second race in his F16.
With the wind at its strongest, the two Nacra 16 squares of Jan Holldorff and Simon Hirst seemed more interested in competing for the ‘most spectacular capsize’ prize with both ending up doing some swimming training. The final verdict was that Simon’s cartwheel just narrowly edged into top spot.
In the racing, Bob and Judy Gardham were enjoying the stronger wind in their Hobie 16, and won the final race. With three different race winners, the overall leaders at the end of the day were Richard Eyre and Dave Littlejohn in their F18 who had consistently finished second in every race!
With the earlier start on Sunday, the wind was expected to be lighter. The first monohull race took some time to get away. Eventually for the third start, the race team used a black flag with Marcel being the only boat to be caught over the line.
Taking full advantage of the stronger wind, Gareth scored a clean sheet with three straight wins. Further back there were a few capsizes and the fleet slimmed down as the conditions took their toll. Peter scored a further two second places to secure second overall with Shin just behind.
The multihulls sailed a long distance race in the testing conditions. The first leg was specified to be up to the regular blue multihull windward mark. However a couple of boats took a shorter route by using the monohull orange mark and were scored DNF. One of these was the boat of overnight leaders Richard and Dave, leaving the door open for the teams behind to take top spot.
Bob and Judy won the race with Axel in second. On counting the scores overall, this left three teams all on the same number of points. On count back, Bob and Judy took first place with Axel Soennichsen second, and Richard and Dave in third.
Many thanks to Tara Court, Ocean Sunglasses and Kingdom Property for their support and for the great prizes they provided.
