Well it’s now Wednesday evening and I’m contemplating loading up Thunderbird 2 again for another weekend away racing, this time its the RC Laser Nationals being held at Barton’s Point Coastal Park on the Isle of Sheppey.

Not a venue I’ve sailed at before but I’m told that it’s a cracker with somewhere to pitch up with Thunderbird 2 for the weekend and enjoy some good sailing and some great social too.  There are several of our local RC Laser fleet making the 300 mile journey to join nearly 20 other skippers for the weekends racing.

A very early start on Friday will mean that there will be no orders dealt with over the weekend but we’ll be back on it on Monday again so if you do place an order with us over the weekend and don’t get a response don’t be worried!

GBR 999, this weekends raceboat!

So after months of manually dealing with orders and payments which seems to take an age, we have opened the first section of our online shop. We have limited it to the Soch Sails items we know to be popular however over the next few weeks we will be adding our full DF65 and RC Laser inventory to the shop.

This will allow you to easily select, order and pay for the goodies that you want which will in turn allow us to easily manage the work flow and orders that come in on a daily basis. Today for instance we’ve sent 2 orders to Italy, 1 to Switzerland, 1 to Malta and a couple of domestic ones too.  Six manually dealt with orders takes quite some time so hopefully the new shop will streamline things a little more.

Clicky the logo to take a look at the Soch Sails Shop have a browse and see what you fancy ordering for your DF65!

Were back from the IOM Nationals, snowed under with things to do and feel like we are walking through treacle, but we’re getting there!

The IOM Nationals were great fun and I finished a creditable 55th out of 80which with no boat time at all until the day before the event I was pretty stoked with. The winds were light or very light which made for some testing conditions.

I had a seriously good run on Monday morning racing from E fleet right up to B fleet in the penultimate race and whilst I could have settled quite well in C fleet it was a little too late by then, hey ho, the company was good and the sailing was fun but some more practice would have helped!

So I landed back at Soch Sails HQ last Tuesday and spent most of the day tidying out a very wet van and sorting out a lot of wet kit.  For some reason this seemed to take most of the week and it seemed that I got very little actual work completed.

That said we are in the process of sorting out a proper online shop for our goodies including all our Soch Sails inventory, our DF65 lines and our RC Laser lines too, this will make it easier for you guys to order from us and easier for us to manage our work flow.

A short camping trip away over the weekend and we hit the ground running this week and have already sent two orders Stateside and several to the UK, another busy day tomorrow will see some more orders going out to UK customers and hopefully towards the back end of this week we can launch the first section of the new shop.

Next week we’ll be prepping for the RC Laser Nationals which are being held at Medway RC Laser Club at Barton’s Point Country Park, so another outing for Thunderbird 2 and some beer crates again then!

Sorry for the long post, lots to catch up on.

That’s it, Thunderbird two is ready for the off. A 6am start tomorrow should see us at the IOM Nationals venue for around 11am. I’ve got the boat, some sails and some batteries, anything I’m missing…..?

Everything but the kitchen sink I reckon!

Good luck to all those competing this weekend, it’s sure to be a giggle, it’s the first IOM Nationals I’ve done and the only IOM event I’ve sailed this year. It’s nice to be able to pitch up at an event with no expectation at all and enjoy it for what it is.  Current forecast suggests the best of the wind on Saturday with lighter stuff on Sunday and Monday although it’s bound to change!

This was Thunderbird 2’s last visit to Lincoln, very civilised it was too!

If you place an order with us over the next few days please don’t be alarmed if you don’t get a response until Tuesday, oh and Scott Mauney, your rig kit is away to you but I keep getting a pingback on your email!

The early part of this morning was spent completing a couple of Stateside Soch Sails orders to Florida and Hawaii which are on their way now and were the final orders before we leave for the IOM Nationals at Lincoln MYC.

We’ve got plenty to come back to and we will crank up Soch Sails DF65 sail production again on Tuesday when the van is unloaded and we’ve got a straight edge!

The rest of the morning was spent at the Marina with the V7 and a C rig getting some much needed stick time with the boat in some good waves and breeze before starting to get the van packed up for the weekend. I’ve booked a cracking campsite which is behind a pub less than 1 mile from the Scotland Farm venue.

Sorry about the photos, taken with an iPhone whilst sailing!

We’ve all been there, arrived at a dual class event and dilly dallied about what to sail then made your mind up right at the death to sail the class with less numbers to make the event look better than it might otherwise have been.

This was the case on Sunday when I travelled up to West Lancs YC for the joint DF65 and RC Laser event, with 15 Lasers and only 5 DF’s I elected to sail the DF and duly rigged up which was fine until I realised I had only packed my test suit with the draft stripes.  No logo, no number, no national idents….bother.

No worries, someone had a pen so I hastily added what was needed, not entirely sure we were absolutely class legal but we did have a number, logo, national ident and even a smiley face.  I have to say that the draft stripes did make it much easier to judge what the rig was doing from a distance.

Some unorthodox sail numbering but I think I nailed the RG logo!!

The racing was fun with very little wind at times which meant that so long as your boat was moving you were doing alright.We did some rig tuning for some of the competitors which gave their boats more feel and better acceleration and made them more competitive. Second and third places were decided on countback as both were tied on 19 points and first was taken by myself with 10 wins from 10 races, although it was closer at times than the result suggests.

Soch Sails were placed first, second and fourth which was good, Fleetwood next weekend where we might have some properly numbered sails….

Everyone loves a happy customer and its even better when the sun shines! Here’s a picture we were sent by a customer from Portsmouth who had a set of matt grey hull and deck stickers last week.

He’s put them on a new white replacement hull and we reckon that they look pretty cool, especially with the sail number on the deck sticker.

A good looking boat! Photo by Clive C.

Does your DF65 deserve a revamp, get yourself a set of our hull and deck sticker sets, they’re cheap as chips and ever so easy to apply…go on you know you want some!

So, as many of you will know I haven’t had the best of years and as a consequence I’m now trying to cram a years worth of sailing into 4 months. I have managed to get a spot at the UK IOM Nationals taking place in a week or two at Lincoln MYC which looks like being a great event with 84 people entered including a whole heap of World and National Champions, so plenty of competition to go at!

I, on the other hand, have taken my trusty V7 IOM off the piano, where it’s been since the 28th December 2014, and re-commissioned her ready to take on the Nationals. I got her rigged and down to the Marina for some sailing the other day and she goes well with the new sails that we got from our good friends at Graphite just before we laid the boat up.

So with no IOM racing under my belt so far this year I’m off to take on the best in the world with my 7 year old boat, but she does look good and goes well in the light stuff!

Looking good if a little out of practice!

Like every business we run on goodies that come from a number of suppliers who ship raw materials to us which we then turn into our Soch Sails.  Although it’s Saturday night and I probably should be in a pub somewhere I find myself in the workshop making more bits and bobs to keep sail production on track.

Tonight we have cut many sail battens, made lots of RG65 Class insignia and a few toolbox stickers as well as cutting lots of suits of sails ready to be built and shipped in the coming days.

Supplies!