| The Cloudy Comp // Event 13 February 2011 By: Andrew Cassidy Location: Palm Beach There are two main things on a contest director's mind in the week leading up to an event - waves and weather. Well there are a lot of other things too, but everything else is controllable - membership lists, rego forms, heat sheets, pens, rash shirts, flags, food, drinks, prizes, etc, etc. Waves and weather are not controllable and therefore create considerable concern for the conscientious contest director. For the year and a half that the Sydney Paddle Surfing Club has been running, we have pretty much snagged good conditions in both of these categories. We have had the odd drop of rain and the occasional small day but overall, we've been very lucky. In the week leading up to Season #2, Event #4, we weren't looking so lucky in terms of the weather component. On Wednesday they were predicting buckets of rain and strong southerly winds on Sunday morning. Not good for a club with only one small marque tent but at least there would be a little bit of swell which is probably more important. Saturday night it rained. Sunday morning, everything was wet but it wasn't raining. Maybe we could sneak in before the rain started up again. I got to the beach and the wind hadn't kicked in yet either, which was creating some nice, glassy conditions. Cool. We got through to the semi finals before the wind swung around and picked up. Not as strong as initially predicted though. It looked threatening but it still hadn't rained. Phew. Scotty's gourmet BBQ was cooked without getting spluttered out by H2O from the heavens. The final was surfed in a bit of chop and the race was run in a decent headwind for one of the legs. It must have been close but it still hadn't rained. Great. The tent and equipment was packed up while everything was still dry. Lucky. It started to rain on the way home. Nice. Here are some shots of the action under the cloudy, rain threatening sky...                          | |
