Thursday nights are now being taken over by Club Racing at the Guernsey Yacht Club and this year I’m determind to learn more about the weather and the tides. I’ve found that so often when we go out racing nobody on the boat has any clear direction on tactics concerning the general conditions so I’m taking upon myself to learn as much as possible about local racing conditions.

I’ve already noticed (from last Thursdays race) that its no good following the Admiralty Charts tidal diamond for the Russel when racing. The racing marks in the Russel are all on the edges where the tide does wierd things. On Thursday I predicted that the tide wouldn’t start turning until about 9:30pm, however when we got to Anfre, inshore on the west side of the Russel, the tide had already turned south and within 15 minutes was running quite strongly.

If I had the time and the resources I would like to be able to put out data loggers to measure the tidal flow around each of the racing marks. Unfortunately, although I have worked out how to build the data logger I don’t have the resources to make and deploy them. So I’ll just have to try to record my observations during races.

Thursday night, however, looks like its going to be a bit windy. For once both Metcheck.com and the BBC Weather agree on that so there may not be a race on Thursday, or if there is its going to be a wet one.