What a difference a day makes! (Well five days actually.)

Last Tuesday the Senior Dinghy Regatta ended its final race at Dittisham in a boisterous breeze with thirty or so boats hurtling around the estuary lap after terrifying lap, helms and crews hanging on for dear life.

This Sunday, same venue, but what a contrast.

Clearly exhausted by their earlier efforts (or just fresh out of brownie points) only seven sailors stirred their stumps and set their sails.

To be frank, the right phrase as you will discover in a moment, they might just as well not have bothered.

Although 10 knots of breeze had been forecast, by 5.30pm, when the race was due to start, Frank Seear and his team had to spend some time scouring the estuary for any wind at all.

Eventually they found a little patch which appeared to have been left over from the sea-breeze out of Torbay, up near the Galmpton shore.

Setting a small triangular course and concerned that the tiny breeze would die out altogether before the Solos could come to the line, they combined the PY and Solo entrants into a single start.

There was some wind at the start but it quickly faded during the first beat. Everyone got to the windward mark, but that was mainly because the flood tide was taking them there.

The next leg was much more tricky because, without wind and with the Dittisham eddy going one way and the flood the other, it was easy to get marooned in one of the little whirlpools in the vicinity of the windward mark and not get anywhere at all.

The leg down to the leeward mark was straight into the incoming tide.

Since by that time there were no visible ripples on the water, it was difficult to understand how anyone could get too it, let alone round it, without getting permanently entangled.

The final short leg to the finish line was the easiest. All you had to do was sit quietly, wondering what was for supper, and wait for the tide to take you across.

And that was it, one race, one lap and bingo! The wind had gone and that was, very sensibly from the point of view of the race committee, it.

The next challenge was how to get back to the clubhouse?

The Solos led the way, down the eddy almost as far as the Greenway Quay and then across to the Dittisham shore on the incoming tide, everyone praying all the time that they were not going to be swept back the way they had come.

As all the old salts will tell you, it is perfectly possible to run a race at Dittisham with a triangular course and no wind whatsoever, using the famous eddies. (It is just as likely that you will end up at Stoke Gabriel if you don’t know how they run!)

The first guy back checked his watch as he came out of the club house after his shower and found the whole event from start gun to packing his soggy wetsuit in the bag, had taken just 42 minutes.

Who won? Well, if you can call it a race there were some results.

Twenty-five years of drifting about on an inland pond gave Jonathan Weeks the edge in the Solos, with Richard Allen and Les Moores, both of whom are always game for anything, second and third.

In the PY fleet Paul Green in his Laser was first, with fellow Laser sailors Bevis Wright and Chris Franklin filling the other two podium slots.

Martin Fodder, guest helming Adam Milton’s Yawl, with Adam as crew, found that the heavier boat really did not like these conditions but at least managed to complete the course and in a creditable time.

Bevis Wright commutes to Dittisham all the way from Looe to race. On this occasion he probably spent more time on each of his journeys there and back than he did at the club and in the race combined.

But as he set off home that wry smile on his face told us that, like all these sailing-bug-bitten blokes, he’ll be back next Sunday for more, whatever the conditions.