Apollo Bay 2018 Update from Race Director Nic McGuigan

We look like we are in for an excellent weekend's sailing with the well subscribed Apollo Bay race. The wind looks as if it will show up, even if it is on the nose, and coming back will be a breeze, so to speak.

 Please read Justin Brenan's update post prior to this one (link below). It contains some words of advice about entering the Apollo Bay harbour should you choose to do so. There have been some difficulties getting this dredged lately so we can't recommend going in at this time. The harbour master concurs with this view.

 http://www.orcv.org.au/index.php/apollo-bay-blog/4820-apollo-bay-race

 As an alternative, Justin has organised a gathering at QCYC. Your humble race director will endeavour to join you there for an announcement of results and presentation of prizes, courtesy of Chirping Bird Wines. Weather this is Saturday evening or Sunday morning will depend on eventual finishing times at Apollo Bay and whether I can get to the infamous bridge before it closes at 1900.

 Talking of finishing times, Simon Dryden contributed a routing scenario from Predict Wind to the aforementioned article. I have updated this based on today's (Thu, 17th May) weather forecasts. First the routing map. This is based on the polars for a 40ft Beneteau First.

Blue means lighter, orange is heavier winds. As usual, two sets of initial conditions and four models to play with giving us:

 So depending on the model, such a boat would expect to finish between 1200 and 1430, all other things being equal. Other boats could be faster or slower.

 So what about the weather? That High that has been trying to come across us for a bit now is still stalled in the Bight and doesn't look like moving for a while. This is giving us a generally westerly flow over the race area which looks set to continue for a while yet. During the race period, we can expect this to be between west and southwest at around 15 to 25 knots.

As I am sure you are aware, this is a VHF radio race. We will be using the VHF 82 repeater on Arthur's Seat, which is marked on the map above. This usually gives us good coverage of the race area but there have been some issues reported when close into the coast beyond Lorne. If boats are unable to report their position on VHF 82 after reaching Lorne, there are two things to try:

• Try to reach us on VHF 73, the finishing frequency. This will probably work better after rounding Cape Patton.
• Report your position by SMS to the Race Director's phone. Don't forget to include your boat name in the message.

I wish you all the best for the race and hope to see you all in QCYC afterwards.