British Dragon Association

Two British boats travelled to Finland for the European Championship, Ron James and Julia Walsh with Feilin's Flirtation and Michael Gifford, Charlie Sprake and I with Nereid. We actually took the easy path of delivering the boat on its trailer to Transfennica in Tilbury and meeting it again in the yacht club car park in Hanko. Slightly extravagant but very relaxing.

The omens weren't good when we flew into Helsinki in a rainstorm with a gale blowing. However, it turned out that this was the last gasp of the weather sent from the British summer and we shortly settled down to a high pressure system with lots of sun, even at times when you didn't really need it, and a mixture of easterly gradient winds and southwesterly thermals as the centre of the system moved around.I can strongly recommend tee shirt and shorts sailing in the Baltic. Hanko itself was very welcoming and the sailing water couldn't have been much fairer with no tides, no discernible Baltic current and little influence from the land.

We participated in the Finnish Championship as warm up event. This certainly showed who was in form, even if the results took some deciphering. They were won by Tom Jungell who sailed very consistently after the disqualification of Henrik Dahlmann for improper behaviour and the inability of Markus Wieser to stay behind the starting line sufficiently often to put a series together. Our best moments came on the first day with two thirds. Thereafter we seemed to spend too much time doing penalty turns for silly mistakes.

The Europeans began very much in the way the Finnish Championship had been with a win for Markus Wieser from Georgy Shayduko, one of the substantial Russian contingent present. The weather also presaged the rest of the Championship. Blue skies, decent wind and relatively small shifts, a pattern only really broken on the last day. The wind strength varied from the very light on the last day up to Force 5 for the two races on the third day. The racing was dominated by Markus Wieser in Bunker Queen who won with a race to spare. Behind him Wolfgang Rappel won both the windy races convincingly but never showed the same speed on the lighter days to finish second. The other race winners were Christian Borenius, who didn't otherwise show such form, Maksim Semerkanov, who sailed quickly but collected too many legal problems and Jean-Claude Danet who persevered to win the last-race drifter. From a personal point of view we were pleased to find the boat going fast, but were struggling with the shorter first beats and very short last beats, both of which seemed to us to make the course more difficult than it needed to be.

More generally it was excellent to race against a rather different mix of Dragon sailors from eleven different, mostly Nordic and Baltic countries who, quite unsurprisingly, turned out to contain the usual mix of achievements in other, mostly Olympic, classes.