With Whitespots being the final colour event of the year it’s time to do the final calculations. The NISeries tables have gone to NIOA for publication but a copy can be found on the club website’s public resources. Congratualtions to class winners Áine McCann, Olivia Baxter, James Ewart, Ann Savage, Cecil Armstrong and Aran Power for topping their class; Paul Graham led Light Green but didn’t have the requisite 4 results to be considered as a winner.
The Colour Standards table has been updated and sets your 2023 colour standard achievement. That has been carried into the Colour History table, which shows achievement reaching back to 1990. It provides a window into the membership movements over those 34 years; Heather Cairns is the last one standing with a full record over that period. The 2024 table is in preparation (awaiting the publication of the club’s colour event fixtures); it shows all of the 2023 memberships turned pink (lapsed) unless they have already renewed for 2024. So resolve to have your name cleared before the table gets published.
The hCOW results for Whitespots shows a very large range of performance, from 6mins/km better to 10:30mins/km worse than handicap. It also shows a positive event variance, showing that following tracks all day doesn’t necessarily help your speed. Congratulations to Chris Colwell on topping the hCOW table (that’s scored on closeness to handicap) and to Alison Collins on topping the Regatta table (improvement on handicap). Alison’s win gives heart to those (like yours truly!) languishing at the bottom of the handicap table that there’s something to aim for even if you can’t win the race. The Handicap table is there to give you the opportunity to revise your performances (you do, of course, keep your maps) and learn what you did well (and poorly!). The empty entries in the Handicap table will be be dropped for the start of next year’s series, requiring that those folks have to use their first event to set a new handicap rather than score points.