Dittisham Sailing Club

On a day when most sensible folks were booked in for a cosy Mothering Sunday lunch at their local, 10 intrepid sailors braved the biting force three to five winds at Dittisham Sailing club for the first two races of the season.

James Dodd and his team went out in the committee boat to set a first-class big figure-of-eight course, with the more exciting of the two gybe marks mercifully out of the worst of the wind.

The solos of Mike Bennett and Jonathan Weeks were neck and neck round the first two marks until Weeks, confused by the size of the course and even wearing a new pair of Specsavers' finest, set off for the wrong mark, thus donating a decent lead to Bennett. The latter said later he had tried to warn Weeks, but that in the excitement had only managed a quiet croak.

At the end Mike Bennett took line honours, with Weeks second, exactly the distance behind that his error had caused – he claimed.

Their joint triumph was short-lived, ­however, because on handicap husband and wife Sue and Martin Thomas beat them both into third and fourth positions, coming first and second by the slenderest of margins in a pair of laser 4.7s – that's a full-sized laser with a smaller sail, ideal for the conditions and sailed with great skill.

The second race was over the same course but with very different results.

New member Mike Webster, on whose application form the ink had hardly dried and who had spent the first race trying to work out which piece of string on his newly acquired solo pulled the rudder down and which pulled it up, stormed off into the lead, beating all the lasers on the water and ­coming first on handicap as well.

We're hoping it was a bit of beginner's luck, but judging by the way he went up the beats we're none of us too sure.

Further back Mike Bennett, not trusting the Spotlight forecast for the temperature of the sea, decided to test it out for himself: the gust he had been relying on to keep him upright abruptly deserted him and in he went to leeward. He later confirmed that the eight degrees centigrade was about right.

Meanwhile, Les Moores also swam for a while and back on shore was not so precise about the temperature, simply reporting that it was 'f-f-f-freezing'.

Martin Thomas was also a casualty. Having led the fleet for the first lap in what was, technically, the slowest boat on the water, he contrived to do a penalty turn and managed both the horizontal and vertical variety, but recovered for a creditable fifth place. Sue Thomas was second on handicap, giving her a really good brace of results to start the series off.

Bob Thomas – no relation – suddenly appeared in his solo in the middle of the ­second race. Apparently he had had to choose between feeding the donkeys and racing a dinghy.

Since none of the rest of us have donkeys we couldn't really understand his difficulty.

The only similarity we could think of was that, under the wrong conditions, dinghies and donkeys could both capsize, but apart from that...

Back at the clubhouse everyone was ­congratulating themselves on their good sense in wearing drysuits in such challenging conditions, except for one unhappy sailor, who found he had one wet leg, one wet arm on the opposite side and, as he climbed out of his leaking suit, had ­managed to pull a chunk of rubber out of his cuff.

Ah well, it's two weeks before we all do it again: plenty of time to get it fixed.