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FOXY TALES MARCH <strong>2014</strong><br />
Love 15 - Graham Kirkpatrick<br />
!<br />
As you may know I have been around at Bass for a long time having sailed<br />
from the age of nine, first in a Cadet dinghy and then graduating to a GP<br />
which I raced regularly until the mid sixties.<br />
!<br />
Before owning a GP I crewed for my good friend Eric Twiname both at the<br />
club and championships around the UK. He was a brilliant sailor who<br />
progressed to writing sailing books including ‘Start to Win’ and racing rules<br />
books. He was a fine pianist, he wrote and produced plays for BBC radio<br />
and ran his own civil engineering and building company as a chartered Civil<br />
Engineer. Sadly no longer with us his legacy lives on in our prize winners list<br />
and the ‘Eric Twiname Trust’ managed by a former member Bruce Aitken.<br />
!<br />
By my late teens my sailing competed with vintage car trials, chasing girls<br />
and jazz clubs. At twenty one, after seeing an attractive girl up to her knees<br />
in mud pushing an Austin Seven, I fell hopelessly & madly, etc. So at the<br />
tender age of twenty two I married that girl who became my much better<br />
half, Judith!<br />
!<br />
Andrea eventually arrived, by coincidence, whilst the club was holding a<br />
spring dinner at the Castle Inn some twenty five miles away. A phone call to<br />
the Castle resulted in Wills mum Florence shouting across the dining room<br />
‘it’s a girl’! Much cheering was heard at my end and so ‘Roger Roger’ was<br />
introduced into the club from day one.<br />
!<br />
The hankering to sail again took hold with holidays and day trips ending up<br />
near water! It was at Bowness on Windermere that it happened! I was<br />
walking through a Shepherds boathouse when I first saw her! I gently<br />
stroked her then felt her wonderful buttocks! I was smitten! I fell hopelessly &<br />
madly all over again! I just had to have her!<br />
!<br />
So at twenty five my love affair with fifteens began and by the following week<br />
my first fifteen had taken to the water at Bass. After her came various<br />
fifteens, several new, and for many years I sailed regularly at the club and at<br />
open meetings around the UK.<br />
!<br />
The fleet grew rapidly to over fifty boats making us for a time the largest UK<br />
fleet. Initially they were moored afloat for the season with around thirty near<br />
the jetty and twenty moored near Dubwath Beck. Those days we all had<br />
dinghies to get to our boats so there were dinghies everywhere. Below the<br />
race office was a very full oar store!<br />
!<br />
!10
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