After 2 days of 10 knots or less we look like getting a decent breeze today.

The weather for the first two days was dominated by smoke haze from the bush fires. We got sea breeze but it was very weak as the haze over the whole state seemed to stop things heating up. Each day it was flat calm until about midday, then the breeze would start to fill in from the SE, a few white caps by about 2pm when we were sailing out but then it would slowly fade through the afternoon.

The venue is lovely. Paynesville, in Victoria, is a retirement and holiday village, very pleasant, nice country style yacht club and the racing is very well run. Warm and humid but not too bad. The "lake" we are sailing on is really a part of a huge complex of shallow salt water estuaries, a bit like sailing in Brisbane with a steep little chop as soon as there is any breeze.

My fleet is competitive but Colin Dibb is clearly the fastest, especially downwind. Stefan has got the jump in a couple of races and held on but Colin is just so quick downwind. He has gone past me a couple of times already. There is close racing with the top 10 or so trading places around the course. In the second race the wind came in from the LH side, I was a bit right and then I just dug the hole deeper and deeper but other than that its been good.

There was a bit of tide for the last start and we had two Generals recalls with Colin and Gavin Dagley falling prey to the Black Flag which made things a bit easier.

Anyway we will see how the day goes, hope the breeze holds and we get 3 good races.

Nick Page