De Quincy Triumph !
Three-man Emsworth Radio Sailing team carry off the historic De Quincy Team Racing Trophy in epic triumph at Kensington Palace on Saturday October 31st.
Alec Powell, Steve Cockerill and Adam Cockerill (seen below) won the world’s oldest model yacht competition for Emsworth Radio Sailing. One of the most prestigious trophies on the Radio Sailing calendar, this has been raced for on the Round Pond at Kensington Palace since the late19th century,when Victoria was on the throne, and is currently fought for in three-man DF95 teams.
Many thanks to Steve Cockerill for providing us with the following account of their exploits.
The day’s racing
After David Cockerill had to retire on the Friday before the De Quincy Trophy Emsworth Radio Sailing rallied to find a suitable replacement. Alec Powell was racing at Gosport and has always been dangerous in light winds was available AND had an electric car and could avoid the ULEZ fee! So,Team Cockerill became Team Cockerill - Powell -Cockerill.
With a What’s App group we coordinated our trip to London and were so efficient at getting there, that we arrived before the dreaded black gates (to the East of the Russian Embassy) had opened. So, we were busy looking for the wooded shack that wasn’t actually there! The reconnaissance team were sent out to find where we were supposed to be and between us we found our black gate and the club house
(shed).
It was a misty morning and looked like it might take a while for it to burn off, but the heating effect of the capitol got to work, and we were treated to a shifty 5 – 10 knot breeze. Now when we say shifty -
not quite on the Slipper in a Westerly scale - but similar.
The round pond with Kensington Palace in the background
Whilst chatting on the shore it became apparent that we had the two great granddaughters of De Quincy himself - one racing and one presenting the cup at the end. Apparently, he was known as Q for short – “sneaky beaky” I said - no comment!
We sailed from the South side of the lake as the sun was low in the sky and all humanity with very different languages were walking by as we raced.
With a little boat tuning I think we were able to be confident on our speed in the conditions. Nigel Barrow from Datchet was even happy to advise, even though he would probably be our main
competition. Such a nice man. However, they were not the defenders, London had won the year before, so we were expecting a challenge.
With 8 teams of 3, the schedule was for three races of 8 boats with each of the team taking it in turns to get some low scores on the doors before starting the round robin of team races.
We had a good start, scoring a 1,2,3 compared to Datchet's 2,3,8. With no discards we knew we were a strong team with potential to win overall.
It was difficult to follow the other teams racing as there were no distinguishing features - new idea came to mind - coloured spinnaker cloth on a Velcro clasp to be attached to the crane - with 10 different colours. Time to get sampling for next year.
We did have a couple of losses in the team racing round robin when we caught a mark with the keel and when I took the wrong shift, so we thought that the points were tight. But the promising thing was that we were keen to team race and often got ourselves into a winning combination from a losing one. Win a team race and you score 1, Loose a team race and you score a 4. We were aware that we
were eating into our initial fleet race lead over Datchet.
Round Robin over, there had been planned to race another three fleet races, but time was tight. The RO (Colin Harper) opted for a single race with 24 boats on the start line. This also meant that the scores could be huge and upset the scoring, so with some sage advice from Team Emsworth - he opted to give the first three boats a 1st - the next three a 2nd etc so no disasters could befall on any team. The wind was easing and becoming more fickle.
After three general recalls the RO (Colin Harper) announced that anyone over in the last minute would be disqualified.
Sadly, for Datchet, one of them got luffed over the start line (nothing to do with us - honest!) so, they would count a 9. When we finally got away, the normally reliable left stalled, the right came good which left Alec the only one in the top 6 at the first mark. Adam and I were very, very deep. Cool heads were needed; we had one long run and another long beat to the finish. We found ourselves behind boats that we knew we could sail round and thankfully we did. Meanwhile Steve had hooked into Nigel Barrow and was ensuring we beat him. (Sorry Nigel). I imagine that Adam and I managed to count a 3 each with Nigel behind us. Alec did us proud with perhaps a 2.
Had we done enough? We were unsure who the London team were and how they had done to be honest. Such were the conditions, that a boat that had finished near last in most of the competition won the last race.
As we waited patiently for the results, we reflected that this had been an excellent event which we should enter more teams in future. Apart from the toilet situation (sneak into Kensington Palace claiming you want the cafe and slip round to the loo. Then out the Cafe exit and back to the pond. It works but you do feel a bit of a fraud.
Colin Harper the organiser and Race Officer was instrumental in ensuring everyone enjoyed themselves and made each start in time.
What an event. We must enter at least two teams from Emsworth next year, especially as the defenders!
